Tiered Soccer Ball

I am very pleased with how this cake turned out :)  No major issues with gravity, and despite my daughter's best attempts to thwart me, it all came together very nicely :)  And I even finally figured out how to do a cursive capital "J", hah :P


The soccer ball itself is all yellow cake with buttercream only.


The bottom layer is my new fave chocolate cake recipe, with fresh strawberries (yum!!!).

Tom & Jerry

One of my favorite little girls is turning 4, and she requested a "Chocolate 'Tom  & Jerry' cake".  Originally I was just going to do a very simple sheet cake design, but I wanted this to have that "wow" factor... after thinking about how I could make it more special, I decided to incorporate the location of the birthday party into the design.  For those who have never heard of "Pump It Up", it's like an indoor bounce-house extravaganza.  Case in point- imagine a whole building FULL of this type of inflatable fun: 

So... there was my inspiration :)

I hand-made small figurines of Tom and Jerry (thanks to Julie for assisting with the body work!) out of gumpaste.  The cake was a dense sour cream chocolate cake on the bottom (which received RAVE reviews!) and a box-mix yellow cake on the top layer, all thinly coated with almond flavored buttercream icing, and topped off with homemade MMF (I used the new line of color gels created by Duff Goldman- WOW the vibrant colors were just SPECTACULAR!).  I was very pleased that the colors I made matched the location so perfectly- while it was technically intentional, I hadn't exactly gone to compare swatches or anything :P

Voilà!

And of course, when we walked in for the party and I saw my daughter climb up to go down the slide, I couldn't help but turn to a friend and say, "Hey, that looks like my cake!!" :P