Birthday Cakes

 

Birthday cakes for my kids last year were very simple.  I didn't have much time considering the twins were 1 month old when I made my son's cake and 2 months old when I made these cupcakes for my daughter.  But, either way they turned out nicely and the kids loved their cakes (what kid wouldn't!)

  

May Clee-Cadman (Maisie Fantasie) inspired cupcakes

Butterflies with luster dust to make them all sparkly and pretty

  

A simple cake.  Two ring cakes cut and carved and shaped into a 3. Covered in buttercream with licorice outline around the cake, fondant road and tic tacs as the white markers - too easy!.  New cars for the top of the cake act as a second present.  Did you notice the flag right in front of the white ice-cream van?  My darling boy did that.  I told him he could stick a flag on the cake wherever he liked haha:)

Fondant Clown and Bow Cupcakes

Early last year we hosted a family gathering (we have them every month) so that gave me reason to make something.  I had seen fondant clowns on flickr so decided i'd give them ago. Unfortunately I can't find the original flickr clowns but they were absolutely fantastic, I think there were about 5 clowns doing different things.  I'll keep looking for them but if you happen to come across them please let me know so i can give credit.        

How could anyone be scared of this playful clown, he's too cute!

Not a very good pic but I think you get the idea - this cake was HUGE. It had five layers, all different colours, covered with a sourcream chocolate icing. 

My second attempt at the Planet Cake bow cupcakes.  They turned out really well despite 'glazing' the bows with water which made the fondant a bit soggy and didn't harden up, don't know what I was thinking!  Don't worry, I'm now the proud owner of proper glaze and for my next attempt I think I'll try a different colour scheme

Labyrinth Cake

One of my nephews asked me if I could make a cake for him for his Labyrinth themed party.  I was excitied that someone actually wanted me to make a cake for them - my first request - yay! Labyrinth is one of his favourite movies, it's the weird 80's movie with David Bowie in it.  I remember seeing this movie after my first daughter was born and it was just horrible. It wasn't a good movie for me to watch just after having a baby.  I cried and went and sat next to her for ages while she slept.  

  

 The book on the cake board had lines from 'You Remind Me Of The Babe' which David Bowie sings in the movie

  

Hoggle climbing out of the Oubliette  



This is Sarah or as I call her Singing Sarah.  Doesn't she look like she's singing!  Sarah is supposed to be looking like she's realised there's only one hour left to rescue her baby brother.



The Worm

Door Knockers

Shhh, she's sleeping!

Sleeping Beauty birthday cake for my daughter. LC went through all my cake books picking out ones she liked the best, then it was a process of elimination to see which one she really liked the best and this was it. This Sleeping Beauty is from Debbie Brown's Enchanting Magical Cakes. I changed the hair colour so it would match LCs.

Please excuse the mess in some of these photos. I pulled an all nighter and only remembered to take photos just before the cake was due for it's entrance. I tell you, i'll never pull an all nighter again. I had a major headache at the party (i wasn't able to enjoy it very much) and to top it off I couldn't bring myself to eat the cake until 3 days after - that's really sad!


Uh oh, where's your feet? Her legs (and waist) look a little weird:)

The colours of the fondant were almost the same as the ones in the book. I had to mix colours to get the results and I relied heavily on this colour mixing chart. I wouldn't have been able to do it without it - thank you colour chart:)

There are templates for the candleabra, bed heads and side bed things and as you can see I made the cake a little too long but put roses next to the bed to try and disguise it, anyway LC wanted roses on the cake so it all worked out well.

The bed head, footer and side things are made from Pastillage. I love that stuff. It dries really hard and I'm not kidding when I say that everyone wanted to taste it. Some even thought it was real wood - hmmm, maybe they were joking!

In the book Debbie uses this stand to place roses, but I thought it would be a good place to put the candles.

This design is so simple but effective. All you do is get a toothpick and mark groups of three dots - instant medieval!

This was another of my husbands wonderful ideas. He did this the next morning (after the party) to surprise me. He's a sweety:)


The end of the dress. You can't see it but i used a shimmer dust to make the dress sparkle.

Below is the pastillage recipe that I used. The recipe in the book calls for egg albumen which I couldn't find anywhere on the net, but luckily I found this recipe just in time. You need to make the decorations in advance so that they can dry. When it does dry it dries really really hard. Like I mentioned earlier, the bed heads were a very big hit and everyone wanted to try it. My nephew was walking around eating the bed head - ewww. I wouldn't recommend eating it though. Although it's mostly all sugar it does have raw egg and seriously I couldn't imagine it tasting very nice.

Pastillage

makes 350g (12oz)

1 egg white
300g (11oz) icing sugar, sifted
10ml (2tsp) gum tragacanth (I used tylose powder instead)

1. Put the egg white into a large mixing bowl, you don't beat the egg just add enough icing sugar until the mixture combines together into a ball. Mix in the gum tragacanth or tylose, and then turn the paste out onto a work surface and knead the pastillage well.

2. Incorporate the remaining icing sugar into the remainder of pastillage to give a stiff paste.

3. Store pastillage in a polythene bag placed in an airtight container in a refrigerator for up to one month.

Notes: Pastallage dries quickly so work fast. If it does become hard you just need to keep kneading it till it comes together and becomes smooth again.

Happy Birthday To...

Happy Birthday to......ME!
Happy Birthday to Me
Happy Birthday dear Meeee
Happy Birthday to Me

Gimme a few hip hip hoorays. Awww, thanks.

I love presents, I love attention (but only on my birthday) and I love birthday cake! One year when I was young (maybe 10 years old) I asked my mum if was going to have a birthday cake. She grumbled a bit and said she'd pick one up after work. It was a honey and ginger swiss roll (the cheap ones from the shopping centre) and I was soooo disappointed, it just didn't feel like a birthday. From that day on I told myself that it wasn't going to be a good birthday unless there was good cake!


Now i'd call that a good 30th birthday cake, even if I did make it myself - hehe. My daughter and husband made me a mothers day cake (i should post that up sometime soon) but i gave them strick orders to NOT make me a birthday cake (you'll see when I post the pics) because I wanted to make one myself.


The cake was originally going to have flowers on it but they didn't turn out, then I was going to have ruffles on it but my Dad said 'those carnations look nice' so i scraped that idea, then I remembered my Maisie Fantaisie book Sweet and Simple Party Cakes that hada polka dots cake and voila - here it is. I must say this polka dot cake is fantastic for beginners, not only does it look good but you can hide any imperfections with the dots - yay.


A cool little trick, hiding the bottom with some rolled fondant, it made it look kinda professional.


Whooa, I made the chocolate fudge cake in the book and boy was it sweet. I love sweet things but it was a little hard to eat. I'll definitely cut out some of the sugar next time (it has 4 cups!).

The original Dotty About You by Maisie Fantaisie.

Apparently the 30's are the new 20's (whatever that means!) so it's good to be young again!

Lime and Buttermilk Cake

This cake was the find of 2008 for me. It was funny though, this recipe was lying around for several months waiting for me to just get on with making it! I didn't think the cake looked particularly interesting and I don't like limes so this cake was purely for my husband and children. Weeeell, guess who ate most of it? Haha yup, it was that good!! It's like a lemon delicious pudding but in cake form but using limes:) It's really soft and moist in the middle and I love it the best just after the icing sets. It's so nice when it's really fresh. I've tried this recipe using lemons instead of limes but it just didn't taste that good. Maybe limes and buttermilk were just meant for each other.

Lime and Buttermilk Cake

serves 8

250g butter, softened

2 limes, rind finely grated, juiced (should make 1 tablespoon)

1 cup caster sugar

3 eggs, separated

2 cups self-raising flour, sifted

210ml buttermilk

Lime icing

1 cup pure icing sugar, sifted

1 teaspoon milk

1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons lime juice

1. Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease and line a 20cm (base) round cake pan.

2. Using an electric mixer on high speed, cream butter, 1 tablespoon lime rind and sugar in a small bowl until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks, 1 at a time, mixing well after each addition.

3. Transfer to a large bowl. Stir in half the flour. Add half the buttermilk and 1 tablespoon lime juice. Stir to combine. Fold in remaining flour and buttermilk and 1 tablespoon lime juice. Using electric mixer, beat eggwhites in a clean bowl until soft peaks for. Fold into batter.

4. Spread batter into cake pan and smooth surface. Bake for 50 - 60 minutes or until skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes in pan. Turn onto a wire rack to cool completely.

5. Make lime icing: Combing icing sugar, milk and enough lime juice to form a thick icing.

6. Spread icing over top of cake. Allow to set before serving.

Thomas The Tank Engine Cake

Here is the Thomas The Tank Engine cake I made for my son's 2nd birthday. I had made 3 large slab cakes and 1 square cake to carve into Thomas, i was worried there wouldn't be enough cake but there ended up being too much. The cake could have fed 60, there was only 6 of us! We were lucky enough to take the cake that afternoon to a family bonfire but we still came home with some - Thomas was HUGE!

That's a sugarpaste head. Once you get the hang of it it's not that bad to make. My son realised it was Thomas so he wasn't that unrecognisable:)

Unbeknown to me, I demoted poor Thomas! My husband pointed out that Thomas was the No.1 engine that's why he has a 1 on the side and that I shouldn't change the number - sorry Thomas. I know Thomas doesn't quite look like Thomas. Where's the red and the detail? Well, carving the cake took me one hour because I didn't know what on earth i was doing so when it came to icing, i just slapped it on and did whatever! FYI there's supposed to be 3 wheels in blue icing.

Slapped on icing or not, my parent's think i'm pretty cool now!

This is a pic of the first Thomas head i made. I got up to this point and i was thinking how wonderful i was when i realised that there was no room for the eyebrows - aaaargh! Back to the start i went.

To make this cake i followed the Thomas The Tank Engine tutorial from Cake Space. It's a good tutorial although I didn't have time to email questions about measurements so I had to wing it when it came to how much sugarpaste to use for the face etc.

Tea For Two

Here' s the second cake I made and it's my favourite with all of the details and little characters. I had so much fun, even if the models did take a while.

Would you believe that I don't have any brown food colouring (i know it's tragic isn't it) so I used browining essence instead!

My daughter thought some white sugarpaste would look good in the teacups to represent milk which was a great idea but I opted for some blue gel to look like water.

Present Cake

Last week I went to the library and found the book Pretty Party Cakes by Peggy Porschen. I'd never heard of her before but i'm so glad I do now! I really really really want this book badly and you know, i'm so lucky, because it's my birthday next month, I don't think i'll have to wait too long - yay!!!


Anyways, in the book their is a square present cake and that cake looked fantastic with a green ribbon and light and dark pink circles. I loved it so much that I made a similar smaller one for a family gathering. It was so funny when I lifted the cake out of the bag, there were a few Whaaaays and cheers going on!





My improvised bow. I made the bow in the book but hadn't let it dry long enough so when I attached it it completely caved in! Not sure about those curly ribbons though (another improvised idea of mine).





Tomorrow i'll post up the other cake I made! Yup, I made two small cakes for the gathering and tomorrows cake is my favourite.