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This is the cake I made for my daugh­ter Megan’s baby shower this past week­end.  The cake on the bot­tom was yel­low cake filled with white cream cheese frost­ing and then cov­ered with the same frost­ing coloured blue.  I added balls of choco­late fon­dant to the sides and for the circles.

Baby Shower Cake

The top cake was made using the good old Wilton Teddy Bear pan.  I made this for her first birth­day some 20+ years ago so thought it would be a nice touch for this cake.  The cake is choco­late cake and is iced with a choco­late flavoured cream cheese frost­ing.  The dia­per is thinly rolled white fon­dant made using Car­rie Big­gers’ recipe.  Sorry but I can’t give that to you here because Car­rie sells it on her web­site as one of her prod­uct range.  It’s a great recipe and tastes so much bet­ter than com­mer­cially pro­duced fon­dant.  I am always hor­ri­fied when I see the fon­dant being torn off of wed­ding cakes by folks that have only had the shop bought kind.  The home made stuff is so much nicer and very edible.

Ok, so I have to “fess up.”  Even expe­ri­enced bak­ers and dec­o­ra­tors make mis­takes.  Stu­pid mis­takes actu­ally.  That bear on the top took three attempts before I got it right.  I can’t believe it since I’ve made it many times before but the first time around I didn’t add enough bat­ter to the pan so when bear came out he had NO LEGS!  Um no.  That bear became choco­late cake balls that I put into the party favour boxes for our guests to take home with them, so not a total waste.

With my sec­ond attempt I totally for­got to insert the cone into the cen­ter of the pan which ensures even cook­ing.  Not real­iz­ing my mis­take I took the “per­fect” bear from the pan and then won­dered why his head was cav­ing in.  After a crack formed I could see that the bat­ter inside was still liq­uid and not even close to being cooked.  This poor bear met his demise down the garbage dis­posal.. sorry bear num­ber 2.

So finally at 11:30pm on Fri­day night (the party was the next day) I baked off bear num­ber 3.  You might think this one worked out per­fectly.  Well not exactly.  Prob­a­bly due to the fact that it had been one heck of a busy week I did remem­ber to insert the heat cone this time BUT for­got to spray it with cook­ing spray.  As I pulled it out a crack formed across poor bear’s face.  Thank good­ness for but­ter­cream which I used to patch him up with.

So next time you make a mis­take or for­get some­thing, don’t worry too much, we all do it!

Happy bak­ing!