Thanks so much to everyone who entered the Ciao Bella Gelato contest!  We had some great responses and I am happy to announce the three random winners…#13 – Chris, #20 – Bernie, and #41 – Silvia!!! I hope all of you enjoy your gelato as much as I do.  

Well, life has been quite busy for me lately….lots of desserts and lots of business details to deal with! However, last week I had the pleasure of making my little niece, whom I absolutely adore, a birthday cake. She just turned 2 years old and gets cuter and cuter by the day.  I decided I wanted to show off just how cute she is by doing a photo cake, but I didn’t want to do just any photo cake…I wanted to put a modern, girly twist on it. I also decided to put her adorable little face on some sugar cookies because when you are that cute you can’t have enough photos of yourself (at least that’s what her auntie thinks!).  So here is the birthday girl and her cake!

As you can tell from her signature pose, she loves keeping one eye closed when she smiles…I love it!!!  So here is a quick post on how the cake was made.  The cake was a yummy chocolate cake with peanut butter filling.  Then I used chocolate ganache to ice the cake before I covered it in chocolate fondant. 

I then dowelled the cake and covered the second mini tier on top the same way.

Next I cut out fondant circles and printed out edible frosting sheet images of little Kimberly.  I left some fondant circles white, I added the edible images to some circles, and I painted the other circles with a mixture of petal dust, luster dust, and lemon extract (basically an edible painted concoction). 

I then placed the fondant circles on the cake and piped pink royal icing dots around the edges.  And finally I lined the bottom of the cakes with pink ribbon.  

Here are some more photos of the party!

Well, as you can see we had a great night full of fun, family, and yummy food!