North Florida Fair- Decorated Cakes Competition

The North Florida Fair has an array of contests for livestock, horticulture, County displays...as well as Fine Arts and Home goods. There are several divisions for cakes and other baked goods, including Decorated Cakes.

This year the theme for the fair was "A Whole Lot of Happy," I decided to utilize another division of the Fair and highlight flowers bringing happiness to gardeners.

I decided to make the cake 4 layers high, the finished cake was 8x4", I went for decorations more than size.

Handmade each leaf & petal for a bushel of flowers: White Roses, Purple Peonies, and a 'Pink Perfection' Camellia (My Nana's favorite).

Gardening gloves. With stitches, patterning shown on the "top" of the right glove and the nonslip palm displayed of the left glove.

Sprinkled some oreo "potting soil" around the chocolate bushel made from a mold.

I created "seed packets" to display on 3 sides of the cake. Each was hand painted with food color "paint".

Packets were for Sunflowers, Tulips, Bleeding Hearts {previous 2 photos}, and Pansies

Made yellow Sweet Peas to trail around and up the cake sides.

Here is the completed cake. Yellow Cake, Buttercream Icing, Marshmallow fondant gloves, seed packets, & flowers, a chocolate bushel- everything edible except the thin wires securing the flowers to the cake.

Here is my cake at the fair, 3rd place! :) {a little worse for wear on that left corner, probably got grazed moving it into the case, pretty good for 2 days after delivery}

This is the Second Place cake, I love it! The little cupcake people on the Ferris wheel is genius (there is a battery pack that lights up the center, not sure if it was supposed to spin, but still- pretty cool). There are cute little prize winners (a cow, a pumpkin, I think a chicken...). Overall, I am happy to be beaten out by this cake- it is precious and very fitting. :)

This, however, is the First Place cake.              *I am trying very hard to be gracious in the issues that I see {and would like to point out} in this cake, in an effort not to appear to be a sore loser. Make your own judgements- I will just say "pizza box" and shake my head quietly*

Here are the 3 finalists together. Hopefully when I pickup the cake next week I will be provided with a score card of some sort.