I have the great opportunity to make a baby shower cake for one of my work colleagues this week. I’m actually looking forward to it, as I haven’t baked anything… Not. A. Thing…in a few months now, and I’m starting to jones for the smell of OMG CAEK in my home again!

The catch? The recipient is gluten free. Luckily, she doesn’t have any other ingredient sensitivities, like allergies to nuts, which would kind of suck, since I want to make her a cake with nuts in it…mainly a delicious GF carrot cake with vanilla cream cheese buttercream frosting. I think I will be converting one of my beloved recipes to accommodate a GF lifestyle. Happily, all I need to do is buy some good quality gluten free flour, and I’m off to the races!

Now to the important stuff: the design!

My current plan is to make two separate baked goods: one dozen GF cupcakes, and one ½ slab vanilla bean cake with fruit filling for everyone else. That way I can incorporate the cupcakes into the design without issue, and will just do a nice piping swirl with a 1M tip on top. Easy peasy.

My original design was going to have rubber duckies, but I just wasn’t happy with the design choices I researched on the interwebs for inspiration, and I was having a severe loss of creativity function, so I decided to move on to something much more simple, but looks more complicated.

This is my current inspiration for the slab cake. Corrie Cakes does a fantastic job on so many of her amazing cakes (seriously, check out her website!), and she is fast becoming my hero for cake design:

Since I don’t know the gender of the baby, I’ll be changing the colours a little bit: the pink piped shells, the owl’s wings, and the inscription will be orange, and I will remove the blue bow on the owl’s head. The inscription will say, “Welcome Little One”. I also need to practice my piping tonight before placing it on the cake tomorrow night! So much to do…argh!

I promise to post pics of the final cake design, as well as the recipe for anyone who is interested in a gluten-free carrot cake! I’ll also post the recipe for the non-GF cake.

Wish me luck!