Since the baby's gender is a surprise, she wanted to go with pink and blues. I customized some ideas that she had for an invitation, and created the following out of two layers of luxe cotton cardstock and light blue tulle.
Having this as my guide for the rest of the event, I needed to come up with some cute ideas for all of the other little elements of the shower, including designing the baby shower cake! Being able to design the cake is not something that I typically am able to do with weddings. My clients always have their own ideas in mind, and never say, "Emilie, surprise me!" - so when I heard that this time around, I really wanted to make this a true surprise and just went with what I thought looked good.
It started with my beloved Adobe Illustrator. I began with the pink and blue colors, with a four tiered cake, a little hand-drawn bird, a possible banner, simplifying the design down to two tiers, adding ribbon, adding a little pearl border, and trying out different color combinations to see what would actually look good vs. what I think would look good in my head.
In the end, I wanted to have a cake closest to the second design page, bottom left cake. I wasn't sure if the bird would be made out of fondant or possibly chocolate, or if I would have to make it out of paper, or if I would just print it as part of the banner that I wanted to make. I made an appointment with Konditor Meister for the cake design, specifically because they had a lot of the mini pastries that I also wanted to order for the event, and here is proof of my visit...
Just me and 10 pieces of CAKE! It's not all about the design, but I had to pick out flavors too! Yummm... I had a great appointment with Deanna there, going over lots of specifics on what they were able to create and what was not as feasible. They were not able to create the three dimensional bird easily and could only really pipe on a two dimensional bird, so I decided to print it on the banner instead, which I then cut out and tied with fuchsia string on to two pink striped straws. I used a needle to thread the string through the cardstock. The top layer (carrot cake) had rounded edges and was covered in a light blue rolled chocolate, and accented with a rolled chocolate white gardenia. There was also a small eyelet pink ribbon around the middle of the tier and pearls made of buttercream connecting tiers. The bottom tier (oreo cake) was covered in ombre style pink ruffle petals that cascaded down in layers. There was also a side sheet cake (needed for their 128 guests!) that was white cake with lemon and raspberry filling.
The cake turned out almost exactly as I had hoped it would. In my head, the petals were supposed to be a bit smaller so there would be more of them overall, but I was still very happy with the end result. If I were to do it again, I should have specified exactly how wide and tall in inches I would have liked those petals to be instead of just saying that I wanted the petals to be "small" and having them just go off of my drawing. Here is a quick photo from the baby shower that shows the details of the cake, which is in the middle of a large dessert bar.
I was going for a really "cute" cake and I think I was able to achieve it. Most importantly, Arti loved it! I really think that for me, going through the brainstorming process on paper or in Illustrator helped make for a better end product. More to come later once the professional photos are in from Shannon Grant Photography!
~Emilie
