What Will it Bee?...

I have recently been seeing a lot of pins on pinterest and friends facebook pages on gender reveal parties. For those of you who aren't familiar, it is a celebration to creatively announce the gender of your upcoming arrival.  Most people seem to do a form of cake or cupcake.  They dye the inside blue or pink and when you cut it open, there is your announcement. I've seen whole showers planned around these.

Since this is our third kid in three years, I thought it a little silly to do anything too extravagant but thought it would be fun to try it out for the fam.  Besides, I'm always looking for excuses to bake.  So I invited a friend over who was familiar with fondant and she gave me my first lesson in cake decorating.

I decided I wanted to do a cute play on words and theme.  "What's it going to bee?" with a bee adorned cake.  We made a small cake for some friends from my church community group and then a larger version for my family.  I have been dying to make bee cake pops and this was the perfect excuse.  I needed a white cake mix so its color wouldn't interfere with dying; I chose french vanilla.  I separated the batter into three equal parts.  I baked one layer plain, another with it dyed an in between shade and the last the darkest truest of the color.  Once they had cooled, I shaved them so they would be level and saved the cut pieces for my cake pops.  I dyed some cream cheese frosting pink and iced in between the layers as I stacked them.  I crumb coated the whole cake in just plain white cream cheese frosting.

We rolled out the pre-packaged fondant (yes... I was too prego, fat and lazy to make it from scratch) and I was surprised how easy it was to manipulate.  We dyed some yellow and some black.  I trimmed the small cake with a yellow ribbon at the bottom and used the black for the letters. 

The fun part, however, were the cake pops.  I made them traditionally, here's the tutorial I did on them, and used yellow candy melt for the main color.  Before they got too dry I inserted two white heart shaped sprinkles at the top for the wings.  Then I went over them with black icing for the stripes and sprinkled black sprinkles to give it some texture.  I attached a chocolate chip on the back for a stinger (well I thought it looked like a stinger, Jason told me it just looked like the bee was pooping but he's a boy and they know nothing about cuteness.)  Voila, bumble bee.  Some were a little more abstract then others but I think everyone got the idea.  I placed a couple on the cake and there it was.  My bee themed reveal cake.

At the actual family reveal I had everyone vote.  It was great because the majority guessed wrong so it was a great surprise.  I had my sweet mama cut the cake and....

Sorry Jason.  You are going to drown in estrogen.  Only princesses here.