Even though I had already created a gift for Mark and Jo with their little "house", I had to make them one more thing. Jo has always wanted one of my diaper cakes... even though she wasn't quite ready for the baby. So rather than make her wait another year or two until she finally got around to baking a little bun, I decided it was time to try my hand at a towel cake.
Not a tea towel cake. A cake made of bath towels. Why you ask? Why not?
A diaper cake is both pretty and useful to the couple about to have a baby. A couple starting a new life together must obviously be in want of bath towels. In fact, I had thought about checking out M & J's registry to see if they had towels on there, but while colored towels would have made for an interesting cake, I wanted to do a white one since there would be so many colors on it from the decorations.
So I bought plain white generic bath towels: 4 large bath towels, 6 hand towels, and 12 wash cloths. My immediate thought was, "This is nice!" No design printed on the towels to have to work around, like I did with the diapers. My next thought as I tried to fold the towels just right to form the layers of the cake was, "This is HARD."
Because I had convinced myself that they would be appreciative of a variety of towels, I now had 3 different sizes to work with, which meant I had to figure out how to distribute the towels among the 3 layers of the cake, I had to fold them neatly so they made nice lines and didn't get all lumpy or show ugly edges of the towels, and I had to stack them around one another so there wouldn't be any unsightly gaps between them. And I had to remember to fold them with the labels inside, not sticking out. All of this was of course easy with the small washcloths. I could basically fold each of them down to the size of a diaper. Admittedly, it took me a few tries to realize that.
But the bath towels! I imagined they would fold neatly around each other in some magical way, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it symmetrically. Fold them too wide and the bottom layer of the cake would be ridiculously tall. Fold them too narrow and they wouldn't lay flat but rather like a big fat snake. End to end didn't quite work because a singe towel wasn't long enough to go around the circumference of all its mates. In the end, there was still a huge gap in the outer towels, but I spun the cake around so that it would be at the back.
After a dozen or so tries, I finally got all the towels shaped into a decent cake. So it was finally time for the fun part... decorating! Remember how Jo's wedding had greenery and berries and rose gold? I got 2 out of 3 with this one. Rose gold ribbon is very hard to come by. So I had to give in and go with gold patterns on beige ribbon. But I threw in some roses in blush pink that made me think of the rose gold and went really well with the ribbons.
I also went with literal berries (well, fake floral berries... I suppose 'literal' berries would be actual real ones). And grapes aren't exactly berries... but anyways, you get the idea. Finding fake fruits that don't look... well... fake... is hard. But I found some decent grapes, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and blueberries. And some tiny pomegranates (again, I know, not a berry, but...) which made for an interesting 'berry shape'.
I had the berries cascading down the sides of the cake, with the blush colored roses dropped in here and there, and the greenery was some sprigs of ivy, grape leaves, and tiny succulent plants. I love the shape of succulents.
The only thing left to figure out was a topper, so taking a nod from the 'house' project, I got an initial for their married name and covered it in gold foiled scrapbook paper that had a floral pattern.
The overall effect of the cake was fantastic... elegant and tasty-looking. Carrying it into the reception hall, I had to explain a few times that it wasn't a real cake. Guess that's mission accomplished.
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