I was so excited for the concept of this cake! I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the rustic birch bark look on cakes, so that part was my suggestion, just because I wanted an excuse to make one! LOL! The animals were patterned after the shower decorations, which were absolutely adorable. We both loved the fox in the decor so much, we decided he should be the topper, but the adorable raccoon was a close second, so he had to be on there too! And the impossibly cute hedgehog, the wise owl, & the squirrel after his acorns!

The fox is all modeling chocolate. The 2D animals around the cake are a combination of modeling chocolate & fondant. The little squirrel is gumpaste. I loved creating the birch bark. I saw many examples where they added the knots separately on top of the bark, but I didn’t like how that looked, because it didn’t blend well. So I underlaid the fondant with ‘knots’ before applying the outer layer, & then pressed in the details with my modeling tools. I like that seamless look much better! I hand-painted the fondant to look like the birch bark, & one of the theme colors of the baby shower was gray, so I went for a very gray tone on purpose.

The top tier is a dark chocolate cake with chocolate chip cookie dough filling & dark chocolate ganache. The bottom tier is a red velvet cake with Oreo white chocolate buttercream filling & dark chocolate ganache.