Boy's First Birthday Cake plus Smash Cake

When a friend asked me to make this cake for their little boy's first birthday, I thought the idea was so cute! With the colors, and basic stars and circles, this cake just screams "little boy!"  The cake consisted of marbled fudge and vanilla cake layers with buttercream frosting, and is covered in homemade marshmallow fondant.  For tips on how to frost, stack and cover cakes in fondant go HERE!

And for the first time, I made a matching smash cake that the birthday boy could have all to himself.  It's a nice idea so that the birthday kid can smash around in their own cake while not contaminating everyone else's cake.  The smash cake was frosted with lots of buttercream.  Fondant would be hard for those little hands to dig through.

Pink Zebra Cake

 This past week was my daughter's 8th birthday.  She thought long and hard about what type of cake and party she wanted and she eventually settled on a zebra themed party!

We loved the look of zebra plus pink so this is the cake we came up with!

Each cake tier was filled with three layers: one vanilla cake, chocolate cake and strawberry cake layer. Then the cake was frosted with chocolate buttercream. Then the cake was covered with my homemade Marshmallow Fondant.  I colored the fondant in pink, and black, and left a bunch white.  

I cut the zebra strips randomly with a pizza cutter and rolled the white and black balls around the bottom tier.  The stitch diamond pattern on the top tier is done with a wilton decorating tool kit and white nonpareils are placed into the corners of each diamond. The bow was made by shaping fondant pieces and allowing to set (harden) and then they were placed on the cake. 

That's all there was to it!  Makes it sound so easy huh? Sorry I didn't take more pictures of the process... it was a long night!

Here is a look at the inside of the cake.  Be sure not to do what I did, which is placing the top tier without a separator.  This caused the fondant underneath to get too moist and break apart while cutting the cake.