cake for a baby shower

I am loving this cake decorating thing, people. For those of you who don’t know me well, you may or may not be surprised to learn that I got my degree in Art/Art History and English. (Stop Giggling. It’s a real degree.) Even Jon, Mr.Negative, Mr. HeheHaHa of My Degree offered up this bit of positivity – “You’re degree’s finally coming in handy.”

Thanks, Hon.

So, this cake was fun for me to do. It was based on the Jungle Babies by Nojo Bedding. Elephants, Giraffes. Monkeys.

The Mommy-to-Be let me know that her favorite Candy bar was Almond Joy. Girl after my own heart, I tell you. I LOVE anything chocolate and coconut. So, I made her a very tall 3 layer cake (each layer was nearly 2 inches thick) of Devils Food Cake with Coconut Milk. One layer of filling was a coconut cream cheese with bits of candy car spread on top of it, the other filling layer was a semi-sweet chocolate ganache with coconut flake. The outer icing is just coconut flavored cream cheese buttercream, tinted green like the bedding.

I rolled fondant and made a giraffe and an elephant, made a few leaves as well, and then piped on green “leafy dots” (you know me and dots.) For a final touch, I made a 3D monkey out of fondant and perched him on top. All those “coconuts” around the bottom of the cake? Chocolate covered almonds. Unbelievably, my icing was so smooth all over the cake, that even the bottoms were crisp and clean- so I didn’t bother piping a fussy border, I just added those coconuts and called it a day! What do you think??

I really hope the gals at the baby shower enjoyed it!

Now – PenPal Bloggers. Wow! Lots of new joiners…great to have you!

For the first round, I think we should do it like this:

If you were the first signer-upper, contact signer-uppers 2 & 3 and get their mailing address. Number 2, contact #3 & 4, and so on. Those of you at the end? Just loop back around to numbers 1 and 2. This means that each of us will be mailing 2 different people. Please include a handwritten recipe to share with your penpal- if you also want to include a copy of your novel, that’s fine too. A note will suffice…just do be sure to have a recipe card. i think this will be a great thing to collect…a book of recipes written by friends from around the country? Who else can say they have one of those?

Let’s try to mail this first round by the 1st of September. Then we will rearrange and mail again in another couple of weeks after that. Do you all want to mail once a month? Twice? Any other suggestions for what we can do after this round? I am all ears!

Have a great weekend!