Margaux's First Garden Party Cake

Cake decoration in the U.S. is a big deal it seems. Shops are filled with amazing looking cakes. For little ones, they have all sorts of shapes and colors, fulfilling the dreams and creative minds of those little ones. After checking it out though, it seemed there were two concerns with those cakes: 1) Their price sounds like you're off to marry your baby with a wedding cake price tag. 2) Their taste is not the best.
So I decided to try my hands at it and make her a two-tier cake. I must say, I was a little anxious: the idea of putting one on top of the other without everything falling apart, writing her name on it without messing up everything...I had "butterflies in my stomach".
It took two days, but I must say in the end it was a lot of fun doing it, and the best is that you can unleash your creative spirit in the best way: for your little one :)

Top tier: Hazelnut cake with an apricot glaze, covered with rolled fondant
Bottom cake: Chocolate-almond cake with buttercream icing, rolled fondant
Daisies bought from Wilton's and glued with a dot of icing (water and icing sugar mix)
Her letter was written using an "icing writer". I tried my hand at it on a cutting board first and just free-hand wrote it.

What I learned:
- I followed a friend's recommendation and chilled each tier in the fridge as I was preparing the other, this helped work with each cake as they hold better
- I used a cardboard to place the top tier on top of the bottom cake: this is a must. It enabled me to simply lift the top cake without destroying each tier, making it easy to cut pieces of each depending on guest's preference.
- Buttercream icing holds fondant better but is quite heavy
- The thinner the fondant, the better
- Writing a full name, when quite long, is hard and messy, best to stick with a pretty single letter
- The satisfaction of doing something for yourself rather than buying it is not only cost effective - most of all, it is a great feeling.