Evolution of a Cake

I had my first official cake order this week, for a baby shower for tomorrow. I've done cakes for friends and family, but this was the first official "stranger" order (for lack of a better description!). The customer didn't care how I decorated it...they wanted a chocolate cake and it was for a baby boy. They didn't even want writing on it! (easy enough). I searched a bunch of cake pictures and found one like this (but for a girl), and loved it. So I decided to recreate it myself. Here is the evolution of Le Cake.

I decided to start taking pictures after I got the cake baked...so you get to miss the batter, baking, cooling stage.

Here you see the bottom layer of cake with a buttercream border/wall around the edge. This helps keep the filling where it belongs.

And the chocolate ganache filling. Semi-sweet ganache. See how shiny it is? That is from the 1 tablespoon of butter you put in with the cream. Yummy.

The customer wanted strawberries in the middle too (my idea) so I used about 3/4 LB of fresh strawberries. Pretty!

After putting the top layer on, I slathered on the buttercream icing! This is before smoothing/texturing. (that's oxymoron-ish isn't it?).

This is what my kitchen looked like about now. I use the whole kitchen and get a lot of things out when doing a cake! The towel over the mixer is to help keep the buttercream that was IN the mixer from starting to dry out. On the island you see what is left of the chocolate ganache in the double boiler and my cake-chic toolbox thingy.

I textured the top. If you look close you can see a swirly pattern to it. I did some blue tinting around the edge. Outlined the baby carriage and filled it all in. Added some sugar pearls and some accents. Did the borders. Called the customer to verify that the baby was an African American (she'd mentioned that in a previous conversation and I wanted to make sure I had not imagined that conversation) before I put the little guy that I made last night on the cake. He is made of fondant. He's got a little spiky mohawk and a blue pacifier. And joila! Here is the finished product!:


I was so pleased with the final cake. This picture is of it in the box. The others I took on my iphone and I didn't download them on this computer. I wish I was going to be there to eat a piece of it! What do you think?

And then I frantically cleaned up the mess so it wouldn't look like a total bomb went off when Matt got home. Here's what my kitchen looked like 30 minutes after I got the cake put in the box:

I was in serious need of a Diet Dr Pepper, let me tell ya!

I promise this is not turning into a cake blog... just thought this would be a fun little recap of my day. Enjoy!