First Holy Communion Cross Cake

I had the privilege of making a First Holy Communion cake for Corban's friend (and our neighbor across the street) Cort last month.  His mom and I poured over ideas for a few weeks, mostly on my favorite cake inspiration site (Cake Central) and finally came up with this idea. 

The breakdown:

Base: 12 x 18" white cake, frosted with blue buttercream.

Cross: 11 x 15" chocolate cake, cut into sections to make the cross.  I did have some leftover cake from that.  Frosted with white buttercream. I actually made the cake on a Wed. and froze the whole thing.  On Thurs. I carved it and coated the sections with a light crumb coat of white buttercream.  Back into the freezer they went!  On Saturday, after I had the white cake baked, cooled, and frosted, I brought out the cross sections and laid them on the cake. 

Helpful tip: I have used wooden dowels for cake supports before (on this graduation cake), and that works just fine - but this time I discovered something much easier. Large straws.
Yep, like the ones you get at McDonalds.  You can just cut them with scissors to the length you need and they go through even frozen cake pretty easily - and the cake pieces stay in place. 
You can see one of the holes made by the straw on the left section of the cross below, and on the bottom as well. 

After the cross got a nice covering of white buttercream, I got to work on the most time-consuming part, the detail work.

I used the Wilton tip 199 for all the shells around the border of the blue cake and around the top of the cross. (love that tip....it's the one I used for the Petal Cake also!)

I used the Wilton tip 7 for the dots around the base of the cross and the dots forming the inner cross outline.

The Wilton tip 2 was used for the lace-looking piping on the cross.  The technique is called Cornelli Lace.  Mine wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough.  I also used this tip for the writing. 

I honestly can't remember if I used tip 2 or tip 4 for the white dots around the top edges of the blue cake.  But it was one of those.

The chalis was made from Wilton Candy Melts, yellow obviously.  I drew an outline of a chalis on paper with pencil....layed wax paper on top of it, and traced over it with the melted candy in a ziplock bag.  Filled it in, refrigerated it to set up, etched in some details with a toothpick before it was set completely, and then brushed over the whole thing with gold petal dust.  That was fun!

The rosary and the cross with the boy kneeling were decorations purchased by Cort's mom for the cake.