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Nightmare Before Christmas Diaper Cake


With my fondness for Disney, you would think that I would have done a lot more Disney-themed diaper cakes over the years. But this is actually the first. Well, technically the second, if you count the Star Wars one, which I suppose you could since Disney now owns Star Wars. And coincidentally enough, this cake was made for the same couple that the Star Wars cake was.

That couple is my coworker Christopher and his wife, Sarah. Besides being a fan of Star Wars, Christopher is my go-to for discussing Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and pretty much anything  science fiction/fantasy-related movies, television, or books. So when he announced that Sarah was pregnant again, (which he did by producing a Star Wars themed-video for YouTube) I was super excited to do another cake for them, and I knew that it would be a fun one.

The baby shower we were throwing for them this time was falling in the month of October, and eventually fell on Halloween. Which turned out perfect because his all-time favorite movie is A Nightmare Before Christmas. Trying to step-up my game since this was a second cake for them, and then finding out they were having having twins (!), I decided that I would do a 4-tiered cake (which is a lot less time consuming and cheaper than doing 2 separate cakes at once, as one of my other co-workers half-jokingly suggested).

Since I was already working on the decorations for my Alice In Wonderland cubicle, I was already in the mindset of using a lot of scrapbook paper and doing a lot of hand drawing. Which was pretty much the only way I was going to get the right sized theme-specific decor for the cake, aside from spending a ton of time and money searching for actual merchandise. With 3 showers and Christmas shopping coming up, I was opting for the less expensive option.

I actually had very little orange scrapbook paper, but I had a couple of orange file folders that I had used for taking various papers home. I also had a paper punch for jack-o-lanterns. After a little bit of experimenting, I decided to keep the punched jack-o-lanterns connected to each other and use them as bands around the cake layers, backed with black to help them stand out against the diapers. The sturdiness of the folder material was surprisingly great for this. In fact, the weakness was only in the scotch tape I had used connect the edges, which definitely could not hold the layer of diapers together.


I only had enough material for pumpkin bands around half of the layers, so the other two had the usual fabric ribbon, in an orange and black pattern. The shower decor was going to include fake cardboard tombstones, which we had built from a previous Halloween, so I drew and cut out scrapbook tombstones in various shapes, some of which were lifted from the actual movie. They also went around the cake layers as well, turning the entire cake into the cemetery from the movie.


 With the scene from the movie picked out, I knew I would have to draw Jack Skellington and Sally. So I drew not only the iconic image of the couple walking hand-in-hand over the curling hilltop against the rising moon, which would become the topper and focus of the cake. I also drew head shots of them. Sally's vibrant violet hair provided the perfect color contrast for the cake, so in between the curling vines of wispy fern-like leaves, I tucked in purple blooms to represent deadly nightshade.


Because this project was so heavy on the hand-drawn bits, it took a lot longer than my usual assemble-and-decorate cake. But I think it was definitely a lot more fun. Normally, I would have added a bit more greenery (or maybe switched it out for something darker, creepy, or less alive-looking). But adding more greenery is where I tend to slide into the over-done, messy result. This cake definitely had the bigger visual impact, from the aspects of color, balance, and whimsy.


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