Blue Baby Shower Cake!

Hello!

We’ve been making up for lost baking time at Sweet Little Brownies! This week, I have for you, a beautiful baby shower cake! The highlight of this cake is pretty much the frosting technique, which is stunning. The mom-to-be is expecting a baby boy, and so the theme of the cake was baby blue.

Making this cake was a bit of a process, in that I made the fondant decorations the day before, and then spent the next day baking and decorating. To make the fondant toppers, I used homemade marshmallow fondant, for which the recipe can be found here: http://whatscookingamerica.net/PegW/Fondant.htm. It is super easy, and actually tastes good, compared to traditional fondant. S came up with the idea of making baby blocks to put on top of the cake. I simply cut out cubes of fondant, and decorated them with buttercream. To make the elephant, I used a shape that I printed out, as a stencil to cut the fondant. Don’t be intimidated by fondant – it will be worth the effort!

I made a funfetti vanilla cake with blue sprinkles to go with the theme of the cake. I used a new recipe from I am Baker (it is listed below), and I thought it was quite good, but not as fluffy as I would have liked. The White Velvet cake posted in the Happy Diwali post is still my go-to white cake recipe!

I wanted to incorporate both the Petal frosting technique and an ombre effect, so I decided to make a diagonal blue pattern with the dots. I loved the look of the frosting so much! There’s a photo tutorial on this website: http://www.mycakeschool.com/blog/pretty-petal-effect/.

I first put a crumb coat of my favourite buttercream (https://sweetlittlebrownies.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/me-love-coookies/) on the cooled cake, I separated the remaining frosting into three bowls. Two of the bowls were tinted different shades of blue using Wilton Royal Blue gel colour. The remaining frosting was left white. I filled three plastic pastry bags with the frosting, and piped dots onto the cake (I did not use a tip). Then, using my icing spatula streaked the frosting dots to the right. It is MUCH easier than it looks, but does take some time to finish. Just put on some Maroon 5, and you wont notice the time go by!

The cake was yummy and beautiful! I hope you try it out! All of the high quality photos are taken and edited by V – thank you!

Thanks for coming by,

-G

The Perfect White Cake

From: I am Baker

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups cake flour
• 1 cup milk at room temperature
• 6 large egg whites at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons almond extract
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon table salt
• 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened but still cool

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare two 8-inch cake pans.
2. Make sure milk and eggs are room temperature.
3. Pour milk (I used skim) , egg whites, and extracts into medium bowl and mix with fork until blended.
4. Mix cake flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in bowl of electric mixer at slow speed. Add butter, cut into cubes and continue beating on low for about 1-2 minutes.
5. Add all but 1/2 cup of milk mixture to flour mixture and beat at medium speed for 1 1/2 minutes. Add remaining 1/2 cup of milk mixture and beat for about 1 minute.
6. Pour batter evenly between two prepared cake pans.
7. Bake until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 27 to 30 minutes.
8. Allow cake to cool to room temperature.
9. Frost cakes with favorite frosting.
10. Just barely adapted from epicurious, taken from Cooks Illustrated.