Since I started my new job and have a receptive audience, I have kicked up the baking. Unfortunately, I've been too busy baking to post about it!
Here is a start on the backlog of photos and posts that I have. This is a bridal shower cake made for the mom of one of my coworkers. They were having a planting party for the bridal shower (since it is going to be an outdoor wedding in the backyard), so I worked with a garden theme. The design for the cake popped into my head after I discarded other possibilities such as a gigantic flowerpot cake (I didn't want to make my first flower pot cake for someone else and possibly screw it up).
There are actually two cakes underneath the classic French buttercream icing: half is chocolate and half is white cake. I was worried that with the two different cakes there would be a big difference in heights - and there was. But I just chopped off about 3/8 inch off the white cake to make them the same.
The flower pot itself is a chocolate cake. The "potting soil" is, of course, Oreo cookie crumbs. It's amazingly realistic. The "seed packets" are candy melts with piped icing decoration. The "flower" is a sugar cookie pop. Those are fun to make and eat but a horror to transport if you use buttercream to decorate them. Royal icing sets up hard and you can easily stack them - but royal icing doesn't taste good. So I carefully transported two cookies (gotta have a backup!) along with the cake, in a separate box.
Transporting the cake is always scary. I drive like a grandma (my husband wants me to always have a cake in the car), but the road rage could easily get out of hand if I ever do end up with wrecked cake. This cake had to go 30 miles in my car, then about 20 more in another vehicle. Because of this I was extremely careful in how I packaged the cake for transport. It rested on a non-slip shelf liner inside a box that had one side cut open then taped up, so that when it was delivered, all they had to do was cut the tape and lower the flap like a drawbridge. The cake could then slide out the front. It's much easier than trying to life the cake out of the box or even lift the box off the cake, both of which are perilous. And, I must admit, the flap was my husband's idea.
Here are a few more pics:
