One of the wonderful things about being super crafty is I get to express that creativity when momentous occasion occur in the lives of those around me. Of course when new babies arrive I seem to pull out all the stops on gifts. For baby showers my favorite gift has become a diaper cake. I found this out a couple years ago when I was co-hosting a baby shower for my best friend's first child. After extensive searches on homemade shower gifts what kept coming up were these gorgeous diapers cakes. I took it as a sign this is what I was supposed to create.
I started by looking for inspiration of what type of cake I wanted to make. I knew my best friend was having a boy so I was looking at blue themed cakes. What I kept finding myself coming back to was this image posted originally on thecookduke.com
Off to the store I went in search of diapers and cute embellishments. I wanted this cake to be super cute and adorable but also have almost all the items be usable in he cake. I started my search of items looking at the registry as well as wondering the aisles at Target. What I ended up with was a package of receiving blankets, a package of wash cloths, and this Johnson & Johnson's trial size package. I also picked up some ribbon and cute 3D scrapbook embellishments.
Now that I had my inspiration and supplies I needed to figure out how to assemble the cake. After another couple of hours of watching YouTube videos I finally settled on this tutorial by Diaper Cakes By Becca. I felt this video explained the process in a way I could easily understand. I varied my assembly slightly from the video. Instead of using a pizza pan I pulled out my set of spring form pans. This worked pretty well for me. I was able to use the sides of the pan to help stabilize until I tied my string around but then could still release the sides when I was done.
Now that I had the base of the cake put together it was time to decorate it. In my original inspiration photo and tutorial they used different thickness of ribbons to keep the diapers together. I decided to try and recreate the same look using the receiving blankets as the largest ribbon and securing that with the decorative ribbon. It definitely took some finagling and wrangling but worked out pretty well. I found by rolling the blanket on the diagonal allowed me to get all the way around the cake. The very bottom layer has a small gap but I covered it in the next step.
I knew there had to be some way to have the washcloths fold into something so back to YouTube. Seriously how did anyone figure anything out before YouTube. I settled on a variation of the tutorial on YouTube by gmjmjazminne. Because mine was a washcloth and not a towel I ended up with one less fold so I didn't have the square "leaves". To keep it all together on the cake I used small hair binders to keep the middle together.
Now it was time to assemble. I still wasn't sure how I was going to top the cake and decided to take a look at the couples registry. They had this cute little bear security blanket with the built in stuffed animal. I used this as a way to connect all three layers of the cake. I stuffed the blanket portion through the middle of each layer of the cake. It still moved a bit but added some additional security to the whole thing. I didn't get a great picture of this in the original cake I did but you can see it nicely here in another one I did.
After the receiving blankets were secured with additional ribbon I dispersed the flowers around the cake and added in the pieces of the travel set. I was very pleased with the finished outcome and though it varied a bit from my original inspiration I loved how nice it looked and how easy it went together.
For display and transporting I covered a cookie sheet in one of the extra receiving blankets. After the first was finished and I had all the kinks worked out it was really easy to recreate this in the future. I think the first one took me almost an entire weekend to put together the second I had ready to go in just a couple hours. They were the hit of the shower and both moms appreciated how useful the items were that made it so cute.
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