Tips for baking a cake

[Vegetable Man]

Hello,

I'm hoping some here might be able to help with ideas for a baking a cake. I spend most of my time in the kitchen cooking, and not baking, so I'm a little nervous trying to get it right. I have a friends birthday coming up very soon, and I'd like to try and make a cake for her. She has a thing for bumblebees, so I was hoping to make a cake in the general shape of a bumblebee. Trying to decide how to do it, I was thinking of the following options:

1) Layered cake with chocolate and yellow cake layers, icing in the same color as each layer(black/yellow).

2) Layered cake with yellow cake and chocolate ice cream.

I thought I'd form wings out of caramel on baking sheet and apply them right at the very end. I was going to skip trying to make the legs(too hard), but thought using some peach ice cream to look like pollen.

I have no experience making cakes, and I guess I'm looking for tips on how to assemble the it.

Thanks,
Veggie

[Chrisi Sweets]

I like your idea of layering yellow and chocolate cake if your cake needs to feed a lot of people. I did a butterfly cake once for a friend, used a loaf pan for the "body" of the butterfly (had to cut around the ends a bit to round off) and made 2 heart cakes for the wings. Her favorite flavor was chocolate, so used that to ice the whole cake, and did the decorations on the wings in her colors of choice. Licorice makes good legs and antennas. If I were making a bee, I'd first go through my Wilton Cake Yearbooks to get ideas and go from there. As far as decorating the outside you could either ice the whole cake in yellow icing and add the black as decoration (black will turn everyone's tongue black so the less you use of this the better lol) or you could ice the entire cake in a regular white icing, outline your lines for the markings on the bee with a toothpick or back of a paintbrush, and "color in" the spaces with the black and yellow icing using your star tip (its a lot of stars but will also give the cake some more dimension and actually make a neater looking cake if you are not that neat freehand). Ice-cream as layers in-between cakes are not the easiest, especially if you are dealing with a freehand cut of a shape. I always end up tearing up the ridge of the cake trying to get it uniform. Keep in mind that most cakes with ice-cream use a whipped cream type icing. For as much as I love whipped cream icing versus the buttercream, it is hard getting a dark color...your black may end up a smokey or chalky looking gray. Hope this helps!