Sherrard Softball Cake

Cake decorating is a skill my daughter and I have truly enjoyed learning and teaching. We love making cakes for friends and family! Unfortunately, life slowly changes with jobs, a beautiful new grandbaby, etc.. and although we don't decorate as much and have had a hard time filling up our cake decorating classes, we still have a love and desire to work on a cake!!

Lately we had been talking more and more about making a cool cake, BUT, life is busy and other things just seem to keep trumping our time and continues to push our desire to bake and decorate to the side. In the middle of this, a friend (Ana) texted and asked if we could bake a cake for another friend, (Kim). Well... when we saw the cake they wanted... how could we resist?  A fun, smaller, simpler three layer cake with dots and animal stripes, and a baseball.  We had all the stuff for it...  and we actually had the Saturday open...  So, we jumped...

Cooking in a house where 4 people, 1 cat, and 1 dog live.. means we have a lot of prep.  We have turned down many cakes... and maybe this will give you a good glimpse as to why!!

We clean by dusting, vacuuming, and mopping - to get the dust and hair out of the house... and our animals are banned from the kitchen with gates!!!

Yes, they have a hard time with it... and so do we... since our animals are our babies...  our spoiled babies... and we wouldn't want it any other way!!!

We even clean ourselves off with lint rollers - to make sure NO HAIR of any kind can get in our 'masterpiece' - yep... we are kinda obsessed about the no hair thing...

We do research as well to make sure we know the exact colors, we shop, and then begin....

The fondant is colored while the cakes are baked...  Frosting is made while the cakes are cooling... and then it is time to decorate!!!  YAY!

And in the middle of all that - we have to stop to make lunch.  For some reason, beyond my control, my family needs to still eat when I make a cake.  I suggested fasting a few times and I get 'the looks' from them... so...







When we get back to it, we frost and stack the individual layers and begin rolling and cutting fondant for the cakes.

Joy is amazing and has so much patience to make all those balls just so perfectly sized!!  I prefer to frost.  Which brings us to another problem...  We could bake cakes too long and make them stiffer and easier to frost... and we could make frosting with all shortening to make it easier and more beautiful to frost. BUT, I am big on flavor - if it doesn't taste good, it just isn't worth making!!  So, we make this frosting with 1 full pound of butter. Which makes it sooo good... but also causes us a little grief on a warmer day (at least warm in the kitchen!!)  No matter how much merigue powder I put in, it just didn't want to cooperate with me.

We finally get it frosted, add all our goodies to each single layer, stack the ball... and we are ready to roll... we usually finish stacked cakes on site when possible... to prevent damage.

We had our directions, and turned on our GPS...  unfortuantely, as much as I love my GPS, it can really be dangerous!!  It turned us too soon. Joy looked at the directions that we were texted and missed the city we were to drive to... but in theory, the fact that we got on a road with the same name going north should have gotten us there.  But not this time... and not anywhere near the quad-cities...  lol!!  We got on a road that turned into a dirt road with huge ruts and almost mountainous (I am sure that is a word) hills that were scary!! This is one of those times I was SOOO grateful for my SUV! I am quite certain if I still had my car... I would still be there today...


Anyway.... we laughed a bit, but got nervous when this so called 'road' had water going all the way across it... I did NOT want to get stuck in the mud. Fortunately, we were not out of range for a few texts... a U turn was not possible, except when we got to an open gate to a pasture - YAY! I could not explain to you how glad we were to get off that road!!   It was such a relief to pull into the driveway of Kim's house!!  WOW....  No major damage to the cake - praise the Lord, although a few things slid around, we were able to fix most of it.

Joy putting on the final touches.

It was not our most perfect cake (yes, I know that is bad English)... and personally we were both maybe a little disappointed in our final product.  But it should have tasted good - golden vanilla cake and chocolate cake, both with a true butter buttercream frosting and fondant accents.

Thanks Kim and your sweet family for letting us be a part of your celebration!!  Thanks to those who stopped by to read and look!  I hope you are enjoying the beautiful fall weather!

Purple and Gold Sherrard Cake