Amelia's Cake

This was one of my harder cakes to design, even though the end result was pretty simple.

This cake was for the January family birthday party.  All of the January birthdays were boys - well, men actually.  My two brothers and one brother in law.  So my original plan was a minimalist, masculine design.  Then came little Amelia.  


She was born on my brother's birthday and lived only 7 hours.  The funeral ended up being on the day we had already planned for the birthday party, so the cake design needed to change.  We needed to celebrate her, too, and a masculine cake just wouldn't do.

I agonized for a few days, spent hours searching online for ideas for a child's funeral cake. But it wasn't a funeral cake, so nothing I found felt right.  It was tough.

I finally settled on this. Basic chocolate ganache (first time I'd tried it), with simple pink fondant stripes and buttercream flowers.  I must say it's one of my favourites.  I should have put a border around the bottom, though.

I think the lettering was genius!  I have a pretty unsteady hand with a piping bag, and I've never liked my own writing.  So I typed the words in PowerPoint with a font I liked, bent them to the right diameter with the 'WordArt' tool, and then printed.  I taped the paper to the cake board and then covered the whole thing with parchment.  I was then able to trace over the lettering with icing, and it looked (almost) like I'd done it freehand.  I would do it on every cake, except tape doesn't stick well to parchment, so I had a hard time getting it to stay put.  Any ideas of what sticks to parchment?