My Attempt at the Baby Bump Cake

Once again, browsing Pinterest has be in over my head! I have so many things planned for the shower this weekend, and so little time to get them done! Heaven help me, I found a really cute "Baby Bump Cake" pin on Pinterest. I decided to tackle that project today.

I looked at craft stores for a half-ball cake pan but had no luck. I ended up ordering an 8" one from Amazon for about $8. I used two boxes of cake mix for this project. After mixing one box, I made two cupcakes and poured the rest into a 13"x9" cake pan. I used a full box of mix for the half-ball (make sure to grease & flour your ball pan really well!). In addition to boxed mix, I also just used a can of pre-made frosting from the store for the crumb layer.

Here's how I decorated mine:

Step 1: Spread a layer of frosting over your sheet cake.

Step 2: Arrange the ball cake and cupcakes on the sheet cake.

Step 3: Trim away the excess cake on the sides (don't discard or eat that cake yet!).

Step 4: Use the parts of the cake you cut off to fill in some gaps in the "body," using frosting as your glue. Below, you can see the cupcakes before and after I filled the gaps.

Before:

 After:

Step 5: Use the rest of your frosting to create a fairly seamless and smooth cake. The frosting can be very thin. 

Step 6: Use fondant to decorate! You can buy some pre-made at a craft store or cake supply shop. I made my own using this "Rolled Buttercream Fondant" recipe. Originally, I intended to use brown trim like in the original pin, but my brown fondant looked like turds. That wasn't very appetizing, so I scraped that and went with pink.

I have only worked with fondant twice before and still am not at master with it. The surface of my cake has some cracks and stretch marks, but I figure that's just more realistic, right? ;-)

With the cake done, there's not much left for me to do until the morning of the shower. Let's just hope the weather doesn't put a damper on our party... the forecast calls for 8 to 14 inches of snow!