baby turns 1..1...1...

Why: My niece was turning 1 and my sister asked me to make her a cake. She let me have free reign except no chocolate, oh and cupcakes would be nice for the kids, and the raspberry I did previously was tasty.. and it would be fun if it was the count from sesame street or shaped like their dog .. but you know, free reign. I actually really appreciated the directions she subtly provided. Complete free reign is hard because there are too many tasty possibilities out there that it's overwhelming. I have to admit that I am so proud of the outcome. I was hesitant because of all the black coloring but in the end I was super happy with the outcome.

What: The cake is a simple yellow cake. So simple that I ended up baking 3 separate cakes. I have a standby cookbook that I LOVE but their yellow cake was so incredibly eggy and chewy that I thought that I messed something up so I made it again. With the same chewy egg results I had a ...moment... of frustration and moved on to a different recipe. I used this recipe, mostly because of the pictures and how it was claimed to be the best. You might be wondering "well, was it the best?" and I will have to say, nay. It was actually pretty bad. I had tons of batter left over so I made cupcakes along with the cake round and when I tasted the cupcake it literally tasted like corn bread without the corn meal. The texture was great but it wasn't sweet at all. I refused to bake ANOTHER cake so I added more sugar to the cupcakes I had yet to bake and figured that I'd make the most with the non sweet cake round that had just come out of the oven.

The filling is my usual buttercream but colored and flavored with raspberries. I also tossed in some fresh raspberries. For the outside of the cake I used some vanilla bean buttercream I had kicking around from a different cake (more to come on that awesomeness!). The fondant is the marshmallow fondant that is not only super easy to make and use but is also really tasty. It is near impossible to make black colored fondant (at best turns out dark grey) and I wasn't going to go buy black fondant to cover such a little bit of the cake. So, I used food coloring diluted with water. I then used qtips to lightly color in where I wanted. It was my first time using this technique and I was really surprised by how well it turned out.

I decorated the cake in about 2 1/2 hours and in the end I was really proud of myself. I forgot about the monocle until we were about to leave for the party so I just used plastic from one of my clam shell food containers. It turned out that there was so much sweetness from the raspberry buttercream, the vanilla buttercream and the fondant that the not overly sweet cake worked out perfect. The cake was a success, everyone loved it, especially the birthday girl. She wanted to put her feet in it which is how you know that she really likes something.