Nashville Sounds

The theme for the Tennessee Cake Festival this year was "Love Affair with Music City," the original date having been scheduled for Valentine's Day weekend. The event had to be postponed until nearly March, but we figured we could still work in a nod to Nashville's minor league baseball team, the Sounds.

This marks the first time we've revisited a cake design, as well as the first "behind the scenes" photograph we've posted. I prefer the glove being taller, and I was particularly pleased with the way the team logo turned out, since I piped it by hand. Tara created the grass field upon which it sits using about a thousand individual squirts of green icing. Phew!

The other image is the cake's endoskeleton support structure.

Sally

My neice, Lily, turned one last week. Naturally, we were commissioned to create a masterwork to celebrate the occasion, but agreed only on the condition that the cake's subject be a surprise to both mom and baby (although let's be honest--baby doesn't really know what cake IS at this point...)

Anyway, we had grandma ship us my sister's old doll from when SHE was a wee tot. Her name is Sally, and she looks, well, pretty much like this picture. I had fun engineering the arms to project out from either side without falling over, and as usual my wife drove home the artistic details. For example: I did the blue eyes, but Tara added the little white dots in each. The doll's hands and feet are made of a different, more plush fabric than the rest of its body, so Tara simply pressed the yellow fondant with a paper towel to give it texture. Genius!

You can't see it, but Sally even had a fondant Fisher Price tag stuck to her hindquarters.