After making the wedding party cake for my brother that I posted about last time, I didn’t really do too much in terms of “fancy” cakes for a while. I still did a lot of baking (and eating!), of course, but the baking bug took a bit of a back seat for a little bit.
One thing I did do in the “time off” was develop an AWESOME cake recipe (if I do say so myself!!). My sister was hosting a wedding shower for her best friend and asked me to make a cake incorporating the wedding colours, which were black and white. The recipe I came up with, now simply known as “Black and White Cake”, has four layers of dark chocolate cake filled and iced with white chocolate mousse, topped with dark chocolate ganache. Mmmmmm…. It’s not too sweet, not too rich, but just right – even my dad and brother, who don’t like chocolate, love this cake! So, now it’s pretty much the only cake my family eats. Except for strawberry shortcake, which is delicious too. Mmmmm cake. 🙂
So, fast forward a little while, and one day I got the urge to try working with gumpaste. My sister-in-law requested a Bob the Builder cake for my nephew’s first birthday – this is the same sister-in-law who that first tiered cake was for, actually, and Travis is their 2nd child, so you can see that I really did take quite a break!
Anyway, I sat up that night with a toy Bob as inspiration, and came up with this little guy:
Not a bad first try, I thought!
My brother (Travis’s dad) thought he looked tasty…
…but he DID make it onto the cake.
The bottom layer of this cake was the Black and White Cake I mentioned before, and the top layer was a lemon cake with blueberry mousse filling. Yum!