First Attempt at Fondant/Baby's First Birthday!

My little boy just turned 1 today!!! I can't believe he's so big already!

Well, one of my favorite parts of birthdays is the cake! Yum! And since it was a first birthday, it couldn't be just any cake. It had to be the family traditional teddy bear cake. I'll post a picture of that in just a minute. But first, I wanted to show the cake that everyone else got for little man's birthday! It started out with boxed chocolate fudge cake mix. I know, super fancy, right? That's why I spiced it up a little. After it was all made, I filled it with almond flavored buttercream frosting and this amazing raspberry filling. Trust me. You have to try this filling! I had lots leftover, so we snitched tons. It may not look like much here, but I wanted to show just how thick this stuff was. And it all started with a couple bags of frozen raspberries. Yum!

And here's what's left of the frosting. Again, not a great picture, but I can just look at this picture and remember how amazing it tasted!

BTW, here's my way of making buttercream frosting. It's not my mom's way. My mom's way always looks/tastes gross when I make it. I can't figure out how she does it!!!

Buttercream Frosting:

1/2c butter/margarine (I honestly use the tub stuff)

1/2c shortening

1 tsp vanilla (or almond extract -- or whatever other one you want, I guess)

2 lbs powdered sugar

Put the first three ingredients in your mixer and let her rip. Add the powdered sugar about 1 cup at a time and let it really mix in well. I know I've put in enough sugar when it kinda starts to look like playdough being rolled around in powdered sugar. Once you get to that point, let it go a couple more minutes on about medium in your mixer and it should be pretty good.

My mom will frequently add milk at this point, but that's the part I always mess up, so I never bother with it.

I froze my cakes before I started working with them just to be sure they would be strong enough to withstand my abuse to them.

This was the crumb coat I put on the cake after I layered the whole thing but before I put on fondant. And here it is all done! This was my first time making fondant and I have to say I wasn't super impressed with the taste or the quality, but I know this was just a beginning try, so I'll keep trying later on other cakes and see if I can't make it work better. I just used the Allrecipes.com marshmallow fondant recipe. I'm not linking to it because I'm not sure I'm in love with it yet.

My wonderful little 2 year old decided it looked so yummy before I put all the dots on it that she just HAD to take a fist-full out to try. Hence the reason my dots aren't placed evenly. Oh, and I kept having my fondant sticking to my parchment after I rolled it out, so I used some water to be able to make it a little stickier and apparently I used too much, so the water kinda sweated all over my cake. I just had visions of my high school rivals that used to always say they "bled blue" since they had so much school spirit. (Don't ask. We thought it was weird, too.)

I took pretty much all week working on this wonderful little cake. I think if I do something like this again, I'll just do it a couple days before because the raspberry filling kinda soaked into the cake a little. But overall I was pretty happy with how it turned out!