Gender Reveal Cake

Babies, babies, and more babies! There are FOUR women pregnant in my Sunday School Class right now! Pregnancies are a good thing for me. In addition to the promise of a cute new baby coming soon to play with (squee!), it means that baby showers and gender reveal parties are coming soon. And these things mean one thing....CAKE! 

I bake cakes and cupcakes as a way to help pay for my hobbies (one of which is baking), and I have started to get pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. 

Last Saturday I had a gender reveal for a dear friend (and family member!).

I baked 2 dozen cupcakes and made one cake that would reveal the gender when cut into. 

The cupcakes were very simple: Lemon cake, box mix doctored up to be a little more rich (that's another post for another day :) ) with vanilla custard flavored buttercream. 

The buttercream is your standard Wilton Buttercream Recipe, with half the vanilla extract replaced with the Wilton Treatology Vanilla Custard Flavoring. Oh my word, these flavorings are DELICIOUS! This was the first time I had used one, and I can't wait to use more to experiment with flavor combinations! 

I piped the cupcakes using the Wilton 2D tip.

(My friends wanted purple for a girl instead of pink because that's their favorite color, and they can do what they want! lol.)

The cake is the same flavor combination as the cupcakes. After filling the cake with icing indicating the gender of the baby, I put a crumb coat of icing all over then set it in the fridge while I finished icing the cupcakes and rolling out the fondant. I use store-bought fondant, but if I ever have to do high volume of fondant cakes/cupcakes I will probably experiment with making my own. 

Once I covered the cake in fondant, I set about rolling the balls to make the border. In order to get a uniform size, I used a cookie cutter to make sure I was using the same amount of fondant in each ball. 

Then, I cut out the letters with cookie cutters, then the onesie by hand. Before attaching each element, I placed them in the correct places to make sure they fit, and looked right. To attach, I used gum glue (no, not chewed up gum. Bleh! Gum glue is a thing. Ask a baker!). I finished off the cake with some painted details using luster dust, and Voila! 

I am very proud of how this cake turned out. Hopefully, some of these ladies in my class will need cakes/cupcakes for gender reveal parties or baby showers! 

BTW: This post is not sponsored. I just really like the Wilton technique and products! They don't even know I exist! :)