Baby Z's 1st Birthday Cake

So I thought I'd do a little post on the cake I made for Baby Z's birthday party. At first I was contemplating doing another fondant covered cake, maybe a ruffle cake like this:

Beautiful ruffle cake by It's A Cake Thing

But then I decided I wanted to make a smash cake to go along with the main birthday cake. I'm sure you've all seen the adorable photos of babies with their own little smash cakes, well I wanted to join the craze, BUT I had this crazy idea in my head of incorporating the smash cake into the main cake as the top tier. I hadn't really seen this before, most smash cakes I've seen are separate cakes next to the main cake.

Well this complicated the logistics for making the cake somewhat. In order to create the best effect and 'photo op', smash cakes should be covered just in buttercream, not fondant. If I was going to use the smash cake as the top tier then the entire cake really needed to be buttercream, otherwise it wouldn't look right (well, I couldn't think of two designs I wanted to do that would work together, there are a lot of other people out there who have successfully incorporated the two styles though!). Then I decided that I needed more practice doing buttercream covered cakes anyway and this would be a perfect opportunity.

So then I was looking at these gorgeous rosette cakes:

This gorgeous Rosette cake is actually a fake cake for sale on Etsy!! Isn't that bizarre?! Lol

BUT then I didn't like any of the two tier examples I saw AND couldn't get other the fact that it looked much prettier in pink :(
So then I came across this beautiful pastel swirl cake from one of my bloggy idols, Sweetapolita, and fell in love...

Aww isn't it so sweet??!

I also used my fail-safe eggless chocolate cake for no reason other than the fact that I was craving chocolate and thought it would look pretty layered with the buttercream once smashed all over the floor hehe.

So there you have it, Baby Z's 1st Birthday cake: