Z as in Zebra

Cakes for kids are incredibly fun to make because the possibilities are endless. For Noah’s first birthday, the theme was “Lil Rockstar”, so I set out to make a very memorable cake. I also wanted to incorporate a “smash cake” because grandmas everywhere love pictures of babies making birthday cake messes.

What Rockstar ensemble would be complete without a life-sized guitar?!

The guitar was a 3-foot, single-layer French Vanilla cake that was constructed from two separate sheet cakes. I designed a stencil in Adobe Illustrator provide guides for carving the guitar shape as well as determining the correct placement for the details. The base of the cake was frosted with white, baby blue, and chocolate buttercream icing. All the buttons and pegs were made using thinned royal icing while the screws, frets, and details were made with dark chocolate icing.

The smash cake was made using a 6″ round cake which was then carved into a guitar pick shape using a stencil I designed. The smash cake was also French Vanilla and iced in baby blue and white buttercream icing.

Upon delivery, the cake was greeted with sentiments such as “whoa!”, “Oh my gosh!” and “THAT’S the cake?!” Being one year old, Noah of course had no idea what was going on. Until it was time to eat! Unfortunately, the Lil Rockstar didn’t really enjoy having his hands covered in icing.

Nevertheless, it was a memorable 1st birthday, and a memorable experience for me as the cake-baker…

All during college, I made birthday cakes for friends. But they were nothing fancy…just your typical, two-layer round cakes. That all changed when my dear friend “Amytons” invited me to her 80s-themed birthday party. I offered to bring a cake as my gift to her. I then set to work determining what kind of cake would best encapsulate history’s quirkiest decade.

After sketching out some ideas and adapting the tiering techniques I’d learned from my mom, I created a three-layer dark chocolate square cake unlike any other:

Needless to say, the cake was a hit.

It was three layers of devil’s food cake with dark chocolate buttercream icing and tinted fondant patches.

I personally don’t like using fondant because I like my cake creations to be 100% delicious. It is nice to work with because you can use it just like you would modeling clay. However, it tastes about as good as modeling clay, too, and I don’t dig that. However, in the case of the Rubik’s Cube cake (and a few other rare exceptions since then), I have resorted to using fondant when nothing else would do.