Carson's Dr. Seuss Cake

When Marci called me about a year ago and asked if I could do a Dr. Seuss cake for her son's first birthday, I think I squealed. I have always wanted to do a Dr. Seuss cake. I pulled together ideas from various other cakes I have seen on the internet along with some ideas of my own.

As with most of my cakes, I learned quite a few new things along the way. I wanted the cake layers of the hat to be red and white, so I layered vanilla and strawberry cakes with strawberry buttercream. Unfortunately, that many layers stacked up proved to be quite wobbly and difficult to cover in fondant. I ended up wrapping it in plain white fondant, and then layering red and white on top of that. I didn't think about which side would end up being the front, and if you look closely you can see the seam from the under layer along the left side. Like I said, I learn by doing.

The yellow and green layers are buttercream with fondant decorations. I drew the designs on paper, cut them out for templates, cut the fondant out and let them dry. Once I placed them on the cake, I outlined with black buttercream for the details.

My favorite part of this cake was the fish. I knew I wanted to do him on top of the hat, but couldn't find one online anywhere that I liked, so I had to figure out how to do it on my own. I used a Coca Cola ornament shaped bottle for the fish bowl and fondant for the fish, bowl's rim and water. I poked a plastic decorating nail through the bottom of the bowl before I put the "water" in so I would have something to hold the bowl on the cake.

The hardest part was transporting this monster. It wobbled and jumped with every bump in the road. I've since learned that I should have poked a sharpened dowel all the way through the center of the cake to help support the layers. Oh well, it made it safely, and I only had a slight nervous break down on the way.

Tomorrow I will try and post the cake I got to do for Carson's second birthday. :o)

Till then...
God's love and blessings!