Baby Cake

This weekend I made a cake for a woman I'd never met. Well, we've kinda met, but not in person, but through the on-line cake community Cake Central, the best caking site EVER (pretty sure I've mentioned it before).

She happened to be looking for someone who lived in the Phoenix area to make a cake for her son and daughter-in-law to welcome her new grandbaby. She lives in Michigan. Not sure what possessed me to pipe up and offer my amateur services, but I did, and it was a great experience.

She'd found a cake she wanted in one of the galleries of the CC website. It seemed simple enough, I quoted her a price, she paid for it (thank you paypal) and things were a go. Now, every other cake I've made was either for friends or dh's office, whereas I did not feel much pressure for it to be PERFECT, but I wanted this cake to be perfect, or pretty darn close.

I bought new pans and I prebaked. Sadly, my vanilla cake wasn't cooked all the way through, so the night I was decorating, I was also baking, which tacked about 2 hours onto my night (not cool).

In my mind, all my cakes seem pretty easy and I think, "ok, I'll do this and this and I'll be done by this time." But I'm either REAL slow or am not efficiently scheduling my time, because caking takes me much longer than anticipated and results in far too late nights. I do like to take my time, but I also love my sleep, so I need to develop a better system. ANYway...

I was delivering the cake on Saturday and told my fellow CC'er that I would email her pictures beforehand. I was very nervous about her response, but here's what she said:

Doreen,
OMG that is so cute!!!!!!
and the little feet sticking out, are adorable
you did a beautiful job!
I am just so happy that you were the one who replied to my request on CC
I cannot Thank You enough

Jane*

Insert smiley face here and cakingly glow. I delivered the cake to the new mom and she thought it was adorable, wondering in fact if it was actually edible. Jane* emailed me again with her son's response:

Doreen
they are so happy with the cake and said it is so cute
that they dont want to cut it
my son said he would like to lacquer it and keep it
again, you did a beautiful job!
I hope that we can do business again
thank you very much

Jane*

* name changed

Of course, I thought I could have done a few things differently, but overall, it's a winner!

8" and 6" tiered cake. Lower tier is chocolate fudge. Upper tier is vanilla. All filled and iced with vanilla buttercream. Covered and decorated with mmf.

Do you not LOVE the baby feet?! I thought they were SOOooOO cute!

This was also my first time doing scrollwork and I made the mistake of using royal icing on the bottom tier. RI is much more difficult to work with than I anticipated. I used buttercream for the swiss dots on the top tier, which was 1,000 X's easier.