Cake!

I've still got old projects from Christmas to post, and even some new ones for this christmas started. I'd wanted to do the Knitting Olympics, and I did, but I totally did not finish. It certainly didn't help that I was TOO SICK TO KNIT for an incredibly long FOUR days. It hurt to be upright. It hurt to try and hold my hands aloft, it hurt to try and lean over to read a chart and painstakingly try to follow it (especially with a pattern that has no repeats). So, in short, the Squirrel mittens are not finished.

I did manage to decorate a pretty darn cool cake for a friend's baby shower, so I'll share that instead.

Her nursery decorations are for the most part either from or inspired by the lilac sparrow collection from Dwell Studio. So, because of that I thought it would be fun to do cakes inspired by the same.

First, I was going to bake the cake myself, but since I was sick (see above) the week before, I didn't have time. Whole Foods to the rescue as they were very cooperative in making some "custom" cakes for me that were free of any decoration at all. Their berry chantilly cake is to die for, and when I picked it up, this is exactly what I'd ordered:

The sparrow pattern is basically some birds sitting on brown tree branches with purple, pink, and brown flowers and leaves. I started by coloring some marzipan brown and adding it to the cake like branches:

Then I added the leaves and the flowers and a simple border along the bottom edge:

and a small marzipan bird:

here is the finished cake along with the inspiration pattern. I was pleased as punch with the results: