Balloon Adventure Going Away Cake

I've been excited to write this blog post since I first came up with the idea for the cake for my dear friend's going away party. I'm American living in Germany, so I have some friends who are only here temporarily. It happens pretty frequently. But this friend and her family are very dear to me. I'm going to miss them.

So what is the perfect going away cake for them? I spent days and weeks thinking about it. I scoured google images and pinterest hoping to get some inspiration when I saw a picture of a cake Up themed. The dozens of balloons clicked in my head. And an idea was born.

I mentioned my experiences making this cake on my post about experiments with cake, filling and frosting. All of those experiments were for this cake.

So the bottom layer was my vegan chocolate cake and the top layer was the Dr. Oetker box cake. They were filled with lactose free chocolate ganache and covered with Swiss meringue buttercream.

 Instead of covering the layers in fondant, I covered the top of the lower layer in white fondant, measured the height of the cake and cut strips to go around the sides.

 The lower layer was a reflection of the German flag. The upper layer the American flag.

I added white stars with edible glue to the blue stripe and placed the words with tweezers and stuck them down with edible glue. The words were made with a silicone press form with black candy melts. I actually had to make them twice because my 10 month old found the preprepared ones and ate half of them.

After that, it was just placing the balloons. I made the balloons out of rainbow colored fondant and used a silicone balloon press mold.

 I really love how it looked with lots of balloons everywhere.

 So much so that I actually used almost all of the balloons I had premade. I had actually made 15 balloons of each color. And this is all I had left by the end.

 And just in case you didn't know, cake decorating is messy. This is what I looked like at the end of the process. Of course my baby helped eat some frosting as well, clearly.

My friend loved it. She said she always learns the word adventure first when she learns a new language. It meant a lot to her and that was the most important thing for me.

It was quite a spread at the party.

So as with any change, the next adventure awaits.