Ombre Cake

      In a couple of weeks I will be hosting my very good friends baby shower and I want to make it special. She lives about 12 hours away by car, so we only get to see her a few times a year, and those moments are special. She is coming down to see her mom for mother's day, so it's the perfect opportunity for us (her friends) to throw her a baby shower!

     Her and her husband found out the sex of the baby already, a boy, and so I've been planning for weeks on making her shower the most special it can be. I've been looking at lots of different internet sites on what other people have done for showers and so many sites showed these amazingly beautiful cakes. I've never tried making a real cake before, besides those boxed ones that you just slather in the store bought icing, heedless to how it looks (and let's face, you really only made the cake so you could lick that delicious frosting off your knife).

    However, being the girl that I am who likes to figure things out herself, I attempted to make my first homemade cake with buttercream icing.

I was pretty happy with my first attempt, and considering I ran out of icing, I'm pretty happy with it. The buttercream recipe I used comes from Brooke at The Little Delights in Life and the idea for the ombre came from Linda's beautiful pink ombre cake, which I found on her website: Bubble and Sweet.

Here's what it looked like before the icing was all smoothed out:

    Again, you can see how I ran out of the icing, I would have made more, but I didn't have any more icing sugar and this was only a tester anyways. I put the cloth underneath the cake board to keep it from sliding as I iced it. 

    My husband was delighted that I was only a tester as he was looking forward to having a slice of "hombre" cake! :) That's what he thought it was called. What a cutie. 

For those who might be wondering how I iced the cake, I just used small ziploc baggies and dropped about a 1/2 a cup of coloured icing into (I would have used more if I had it). Also, to make the dark blue icing, I added a small drop of black food colouring to my medium coloured blue. 

Looking forward to making a few more testers before the baby shower, and also to show pictures of the final event!

Happy Monday!