The Joys of Caking: Leslie's Lil' Pumpkin Patch

This was my third cake in three weeks. I had survived to the final round!

I made Leslie's wedding cake, so it was really fun to be able to make her baby shower cake as well. The shower was in the fall and the theme was pumpkin patch. And when you are making a cake full of pumpkins, what better flavor to use than pumpkin?

I decided to make cake pops for the pumpkins. I used this recipe from Pop Sugar for pumpkin cake and it turned out really tasty. I used their cream cheese frosting recipe as well.

I have a baby cakes machine, but this time I did the traditional cake pop procedure - mixing the frosting with the cake. I formed the balls and put them in the freezer for a short time. I melted some orange candy melts, stuck the shortened lollipop sticks in the candy, and then stuck them in the cake pops. I put them back in the freezer to make sure the sticks would stay in the pops when I dipped them in the candy.

I dipped them in the orange candy melts put them in styrofoam cups to dry. Cake pops are hard - I can never get them to look smooth!

For the cake, I wanted to make part of of it pumpkin and part yellow cake. I wasn't sure if everyone would want pumpkin cake, so I need to have more than one option.

I got this nifty little tool at Hobby Lobby. You put it in the pan, then pour in the batter on each side. Then you quickly remove the divider.

The pumpkin batter was a lot more dense than the yellow batter, so I put that in first and kind of smooshed the divider up against it. It was a little more difficult to do than I thought because the divider wouldn't stand up on it's own. But it did the job!

Now, the yellow cake did bake over the pumpkin part just a tad.

But as you can see, it was just on the top. When I cut it in half, it looks great!

I filled the yellow cake part with raspberry whipped cream filling and the pumpkin part with cream cheese frosting.

Then I covered the whole thing with green buttercream frosting. I didn't worry about making it look smooth on the top because I was going to add grass piping.

I piped the grass and added the pumpkins.

Of course they look a little boring and plain. So I added some leaves and vines to make them look more like pumpkins. This is also a great way to cover up errors and bumps on your cake pops.

Now I needed to make the baby inside the pumpkin. I made one really large cake pop and covered it with orange fondant. Then I made a smaller, round, ivory ball for the head.

It didn't look that great - you can see where I had trouble with the fondant. But I knew I was going to add details to it, so I didn't worry about it.

Next I made some fondant hands. Basically you just roll a little ball of fondant and then smoosh it down into a circle. Then using your fondant sculpting tools, you make the fingers.

I used a round cutter to cut out some cake for the hat. I covered that in orange fondant as well and made the brown stem. You can also see where I've pinched the nose on the baby's face.

I added the ears and the hat. I used a toothpick dipped in black food coloring for the face details. I also used pink petal dust for the cheeks. I didn't put the baby on the cake until I got to the shower. Then I piped some green leaves and vines to add a little more color and to cover up those ugly spots on the fondant.