My 1st baby shower cake

Between school and work I have not been great about posting but am going to try to do a better job in 2015 :)  Enough excuses... on to the focus of this post which is the baby shower cake that I had the pleasure of making for my boyfriend's sweet cousin over Thanksgiving weekend.

Jess & Brad are expecting a little boy, Jack, and are planning on a Monster theme for his nursery.  I made a Pinterest board of different baby monster ideas for inspiration.  You can see it by clicking here.

Anytime I get a request for a cake I start a board to gather inspiration.  In this case, Jessica liked this monster cake the best:

I found it on Pinterest but my pin pointed to Arte de Ka for the source.  If you follow the link there are some truly amazing cakes there.

Here is a pic of my attempt which I think is decent considering it's only my 4th fondant covered cake....

If you blow this pic up you'll see some of the lessons learned/mishaps on this one.

1. My middle tier's "ears" are higher.  I tried putting them on the side but that layer was a chocolate box mix and was WAY too soft to support them.  They were fondant and I was using bamboo skewers that I had snipped to length.  I changed to straws and added them at the top for more support.
2. The eye in the middle.  Again, the softer layer and bamboo skewer did not go well together.  Changed the support to a straw and moved it up to let the top of the layer support it more.  Next time I'll use more of a chocolate pound cake for better stability.

The top and bottom layers were "wedding cake" flavor using the WASC recipe on cake central.com.  All 3 layers were frosted with Italian buttercream and covered with Renshaw fondant which I really liked and would be happy to use again.  It was easy to work with right out of the package and was not as hard to get started with.  I couldn't find my fondant smoother so I wasn't able to get quite as smooth a finish as I would have preferred but overall the tiers ended up being nice and straight and I was very happy with it.

Happy baking and please ask any questions.... I'm happy to respond!  :)