John Deere Baby Shower

John Deere Baby Shower

I recently had the pleasure of making a baby shower cake with a John Deere theme.  This was not going to be a typical farm theme baby shower because the expectant couple is going to have a girl.  

Cake made by cakecentral member "ranbel"

When the shower hostess contacted me about making the cake, she sent along a picture of a cake with the look they were going for.  The picture was of a 2-tier cake with a small pink tractor, cart and baby on the top.  

The shower hostess didn't need a cake this big and was working within a budget so I suggested they skip the tiered cake design (which adds $) and go for a 2-layer cake big enough for the servings they needed.  We decided a 10-inch round would work.

I made my pink tractor and cart out of cereal treats, covered in white chocolate, then covered in fondant.  After studying different designs of tractor cake toppers, I settled on a design in which the cab portion sits on top of the engine or hood section.  This was fairly simple to make as I used pre-made Rice Krispie Treats which were almost exactly the size I needed.  I made the cart out of homemade cereal treats - that's when I decided to buy the ones for the tractor.  I found the pre-made ones easier to work with.  I found a couple of good tractor tutorials from Rose Atwater: Tractor Tutorial #1 and Tractor Tutorial #2.

The front wheels of the tractor are also cereal treats but the back wheels are mini-doughnuts covered in fondant.  I covered the cart with fondant that I had imprinted with a wooden board mat and used an extruder gun to make hay.  The tractor is surprisingly heavy and I had to put straws underneath it with a small piece of cardboard for support so that it would not sink into the cake.

I stressed a bit about how to make the baby.  At first, I was going to purchase a mold but decided to try my hand at making one on my own.  It turned out to be very simple since I only needed the head to show.  The rest of the body is hidden under the pink fondant blanket.  I thought it would be cute to make the baby look like it had been picked from the field.

Once I measured around my cake pan and subtracted a few inches for the gate, I used the Jessica Harris wax paper transfer method to get my fence rails on the cake.  I learned this technique from the Craftsy class,  "Clean and Simple Cake Design".  The fence posts were imprinted with the same wood imprint mat I used for the cart.  I decided to go with a more farm-look fence rather than the fence in the inspiration picture and finished it off with a swag of dainty flowers that ran from fence post to fence post.