This cake was created to honor all the mothers in my husband’s family, for the big celebration they have every year. It includes MANY mothers, most notably my precious mother in law Sarah. I have kept a picture of a lovely Sherri Hill pageant gown for a long time, because I’ve been looking for an excuse to try to create it in cake. So this was my chance! The original gown is pink, but I wanted to use my favorite teal blue instead.

Honestly, I’m not at all happy with how the ‘skirt’ turned out. We just moved to Texas 3 weeks ago. I learned something very quickly. My homemade fondant melts here & turns to a goo. I wanted the skirt to be much more ‘dimensional’ like the skirt on the dress, but the petals just kept drooping no matter what I did. I even tried drying them in my dehydrator! That worked——until they were on the cake for a few minutes. I tried several other ideas, even cutting out tiny pieces of fondant & pushing them up into the tops of the petals to kind of prop them up to hold them out form the cake. Looked great for a while & then they just drooped over them. ;-/

I still want to achieve this look, & have some ideas about how to improve on it. That is the great thing about my family being my guinea pigs! I can screw up royally, & it’s OK! No risk, no reward. If any of you lovely cake artists out there have some suggestions, I would appreciate your ideas! I included a picture of the cake & the dress together.

I also experimented with some flavor combinations. I went all ‘Elvis’ on the top tier! It’s a banana cake with chocolate ganache, & filled with a Peanut Butter/white chocolate/honey buttercream. OMG! Maybe the best filling I’ve ever made! Definitely a successful experiment! The bottom tier is a white velvet cake, filled with white chocolate buttercream, & iced with white chocolate ganache.

Happy Mother’s Day to my wonderful mother, Jerri, my sister Tiffany, my mother in law Sarah, & ALLLLL the other incredible moms out there! XOXOXO