Best Baby Shower Cakes for Baby Boys and Girls

Winnie the Pooh cakes are very popular for boy baby showers. And if Pooh bear isn't the mother-to-be's favorite character, maybe Tigger will tickle her fancy.

Other ideas for boy baby shower themes would be to bake a round ball shaped cake using a special cake pan if the guest of honor is a baseball, basketball or soccer fan or a football shaped cake on a sheet cake decorated like the gridiron complete with yard lines and green turf.

For a NASCAR shower, a race car shaped cake would be super.

A hunting or military theme shower might call for a cake decorated with fondant in a Realtree camouflage design where a forest friends themed shower would include everything from fox and racoon cake decorations to baby deer, squirrel and owls.

The lively colors used to decorate this baby shower cake for a girl are what make it one of the best baby shower cakes for a spring or summer party in the backyard or out on the patio by the pool.

The "korker" ribbons add a light-hearted touch to the large, elegant fondant bow and they are so easy to make!

The hardest part of making this pink and brown polka dot baby shower cake for a baby girl's shower that I hosted recently was turning white fondant into dark, chocolate brown color fondant. Wearing latex gloves while kneading the food coloring into the fondant was impossible. I just had to do it bare-handed which left me with grubby, brown fingernails for a few days but the results were totally worth it!

The dark pink color fondant and the pale pink gum paste color bow were so much easier to make than that dark brown! Next time I'll know to order brown fondant! Even it it's more expensive, it will save a lot of time and elbow grease. It took me hours to work the pink and brown food coloring evenly into the fondant. After I had my frosting dyed and rolled into a ball wrapped in plastic wrap; decorating my pink and brown polka dot baby shower cake was well...a piece of cake!

First I crumb coated the three eight inch layers of the cake.

Then I rolled out two pounds of pink fondant to a thickness of 1/16 of an inch thick and carefully draped it over the crumb-coated layers. Using a plastic pizza cutter, I trimmed the excess from around the bottom of the cake. I did NOT roll the leftover fondant back into a ball so that I could use it for small, topsy turvy pink polka dots that you see on top of the dark brown dots.

Next I rolled out the (dratted) dark brown fondant and using the circular end of a large frosting tip, cut out the large polka dotted decorations and stuck them onto the pink fondant in a random style.

Using the circular end of a small cake frosting tip I cut out the small, pink polka dots decorations and stuck them onto the larger brown dots.

To make the beaded border around the base of the cake, once again the circular end of a large frosting tip was used to cut out circles in both the pink and brown so that I knew they would be uniform in size. I rolled them up and then alternated the pink and brown beads around the cake.

After that was all done, I added the large fondant bow to the top of the pink and brown polka dot baby shower cake to camouflage a place where the fondant was less than perfect because the top layer of the cake had collapsed! YIKES! That's one thing that keeps me so interested in fondant baby shower cake ideas; fondant covers just about any underlying mistake to help you avoid those last minute cake catastrophes!

The only problem I had decorating this cake had to do with the layers being too soft NOT the gum paste or fondant decorations! Oh, and I completely forgot to cover the cardboard cake round with brown fondant but it's still pretty, right?

Most of find find the idea of decorating a cake using fondant rather intimidating. I know that I did until I jumped in and tried my hand at it. After getting over my fear, I actually made one of the prettiest and best baby shower cakes that I had ever made in yellow with purple polka dots. Making my own fondant out of marshmallows got a little "sticky" and it took me longer to make it than my traditional (read: boring) chocolate sheet cake but it turned out amazing! And the big, gum paste bow is just the coolest thing ever especially since it's my first effort. I'm as serious as I can be; the cake in the picture is the first cake that I ever decorated with fondant. For that reason, I feel very good about telling you that a polka dot baby shower cake is a great cake for a beginner!

Before you jump to the actual list, allow me to share a few thoughts on what hostesses are, or should be, looking for. Remember the days when desserts were simply for eating? I can remember my grandmother saying as she dished out our dessert after our Sunday meal, "It's not very pretty but that doesn't matter as long as it tastes good". Nobody wants to serve their guests a festive dessert that looks scrumptious but tastes awful but presentation and appearance is much more important than my dear granny ever dreamed.

If today's hostess isn't searching for the perfect cake, she is looking for an acceptable balance of flavor and attractive presentation.

The most popular cakes for a baby shower are..(drumroll)

1. DIAPER CAKES - Yes, gentle readers, the most popular baby shower cake of all is made up of either cloth or disposable diapers and completely inedible. This kind of blows my theory on taste but you can bet that if there is a diaper cake on display that your hostess will have baked up some delightful baby shower cupcakes for you to nibble on while the guest of honor opens her gifts as edible baby shower cakes are still very much in style.

2. Baby Bib Shower Cakes - First diaper cakes and then bib cakes; do people not love sweets as much as I do? When are we going to get to the good stuff!

3. Winnie the Pooh Baby Shower Cakes - NOW, we're getting to the good stuff!

4. Baby Bath Towel Cakes - Uh Oh, we just slid back in to cakes make of cloth rather than good, old-fashioned sugar and flower decorated like Pooh Bear and in other favorite baby themes but do not despair, things are about to turn around in a big way!

5. Care Bear Baby Shower Cakes for boys are a huge favorite ranking right behind classic Pooh.

6. Butterfly Baby Shower Cakes

7. Stork Baby Shower Cake

8. Prince and Princess baby shower cakes depending, of course, on whether a baby boy or girl is expected

9. Duck baby shower cake

10. Hawaiian baby shower cake.

If you didn't see your favorite, like the Topsy Turvy Cake, on the list or if you noticed a few of the traditional decorated cakes didn't make the cut; there are several factors come into play. For one thing, themes go in and out of vogue as well as various color combinations. Should you take this to mean that you shouldn't dash down to your bakery and have a diaper pin or baby rattle cake decorated in orange or whatever color you want? Absolutely not! Some of the the most amazing, creative baby shower cakes I've seen lately are not on the above list and it's certainly appropriate to do your own thing so long as the mother-to-be gives your ideas a big "thumbs up".

Most cooks who bake cakes on a regular basis have a special cabinet in their kitchen that is filled with cake pans of every size. There are those that are used more often than others like the jelly roll pan or sheet cake pan and the 8 inch and 9 inch round pans that can be neatly nested and used over and over for birthday cakes as well as for showers and other parties.

With the right skills, a sharp knife and a good cake decorating book, you can stack and carve those layers into any shape you want but the easy way to turn out a baby lamb or rubber ducky cake is by pouring your batter directly into a special baby shower cake pan that creates 3D shapes with no artistic sculpting skills necessary. Some of the most popular baby cake pans are shaped like storks, baby bottles, rattles but for themed showers the princess castle cake pans and sports theme cake pans are often pulled into service by hostesses baking for a baby girl's princess shower or a baby boy's sports theme shower.

And here's a huge surprise for those of you who put your baking skills on hold for the past few years; cake pans aren't just made of metal anymore! If you haven't baked using silicone baking pans, you are in for a real treat! There's no worry about rust and the cakes pop out so beautifully that you will want to add some to your stash immediately!

Decorating cakes in themes just makes sense since hostesses find planning their parties based on their favorite baby shower themes to be so helpful.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, the cake is not just a tasty snack it also serves as a table decoration. The bigger, the more colorful and in line with the theme of the day the better! As an example, what would a Winnie the Pooh baby shower be without a cute Eeyore, Tigger or Pooh cake? If the tableware and decorations have your favorite characters covered,you might consider making a beehive cake surrounded with cute little honey pots full of something sweet to eat!

The ultimate goal of the creative baby shower hostess is to bake and decorate her (or his?) own cake. The notion of having complete creative control over size, color and design is as dizzying as it is enticing. Baking a unique, one-of-a-kind creation the likes of which has never been seen in your circle of friends would be the ultimate triumph in entertaining and it's something that is certainly within reach of every savvy chick with a few basic baking skills, ingrediants and cake decorating tools at her disposal.

But, there are a few things that you might want to ask yourself before you jump in and start rattling those pots and pans. For instance:

a. Do you really have time not only to bake and decorate the cake but to learn HOW ?
b. Would it be less expensive to have a professional bake the cake?

If you throw one baby shower after another and want to build a reputation of being the "Queen of Baby Shower Ideas" , then it would be worth your time and money to buy some books filled with pictures of the best baby shower cakes and all of the fondant, gum paste and cake pans necessary to put yourself in positiion to bake some of the coolest baby shower cakes known to mankind. However, if you throw one birthday party or shower every couple of years save your time and energy (not to mention your money) , find a bakery that is known for their unique cakes and direct your efforts towards something more productive.