The Making of Sarah's Baby Cake

After months of planning Sarah's Baby shower the date finally arrived!!

Everything was set and ready to go except for...the cake!

Sarah makes the cakes! Marlene & I are her assistants. Sure we ARE amazing, but without Sarah we are like 2 chickens with our heads cut off. Ha!

So the Thursday before the shower - I started baking. I bake for a living so this was easy enough. Although, it's NOTHING like baking a cake for cakeballs! The cakes have to actually LOOK perfect when they come out of the oven! I can't just crumble them and cover up any lumps or uneven spots!

Luckily Sarah did let me borrow all her cake supplies. The special pans & bake even strips were fun to use!

The White Cake Recipe I used was also delicious! Thank goodness because it needed to be the right texture in order to stack properly and yet taste good! We were able to get both!

I baked 6 cakes on Thursday (plus filled a cakeball order). I should've taken pics of those too but I didn't. I was too concerned with how the cakes were turning out!

Friday I was up by 6am purely out of excitement! I began by making the cakes even and ready to be stacked and dirty iced.

The first challenge was the car. We wanted to put a car on top of the cake because Sarah's theme for Gabriel's nursery is transportation. Trains, planes & cars! We already had a plane planned to hang above the cake, a train painted on the piggy that would sit beside the cake so the only thing missing was the car. (That and the other cake we had picked out would've taken us years to complete) So the cake car won!

I had fun slicing the tops off the cakes! Especially because this was how we were able to sample it to see if it was tasty or not!

After dirty icing the bottom and stacking the 2nd layer of cake on top, I carved the cake to look like a little VW Bug car.

Then I dirty iced the entire car. To those non-Cake Boss fans the correct term is "Crumb coat"
Crumb Coat or Dirty Ice: used to describe a thin layer of frosting that keeps crumbs where they belong–on the cake–not the frosting! Allows fondant to lay and stick smoothly against the cake.

Then I covered it in blue fondant. I have NO idea how Sarah would've done this, but I am certain she wouldn't have had folds on the sides. I really had no idea what else to do with the extra fondant fold. At least I made the folds where the wheels were supposed to go. 

About this time Marlene came over to help! Thank goodness! It really took ALL day to get this cake done.

We began by stacking, dirty icing & decorating the bottom layer. This was the largest layer & adding stripes to a round cake can be tricky. So I cut and handed the stripes to Marlene & let her do the hard part!

It turned out great! Perfect actually!

Then we worked on the top layer. We covered it in white fondant and then decorated it with light blue & dark blue dots.

Then we rolled teeny tiny balls of fondant for the borders of each layer. Our fingers were sore after this part!

Finally we decorated the car! This was the fun part! Tim suggested we use Baby Gabriel's initials and due date for the license plate which made it even cuter!

These pics are from my iphone (sorry that the quality isn't great!) It was also getting late and very dark outside!

Yay for our VW Bug! We were so proud of how it turned out!

We stacked the 2 cake layers and added the fondant border. We knew we'd be rushed for time in the morning before the shower so we decided to risk stacking it ahead of time. Luckily (and after LOTS of prayer) the next morning the cake was still standing & looked just as it did the night before!

We did wait and stack the car on top AFTER transporting it to Rachel's house for the shower. This we were not willing to take a risk on!

Finally, after adding Gabriel's name in edible marker on white fondant and stacking it all together.

Here's the finished product!

Sarah we hope you LOVED it as much as we did! Pigachoo (get it - Pig + Choo Choo) even looked cute sitting by the cake! The flowers were done by Rose at Ultimate Affaire. She's AMAZING! They matched the cake perfectly!

Here are a few more pics of the cake!

A close up of the license plate!

YAY for Baby Gabriel! I know it looks like Sharpie, but the letters were definitely written with Edible Markers!

Marlene and I survived our first SOLO Cake Experience. We really missed Sarah though! It was funny because Sarah kept saying we could go to Plan B which I guess she thought was buy a cake, but Plan B for us would've been CALL SARAH! ha! So teacher Sarah I hope your 2 assistants made you proud! We love you and can't wait to meet that precious baby boy in your belly!!