FOR THE LOVE OF CAKE

I feel as though CAKES have been my theme lately, with various celebrations that have happened over the last few months. So this week I thought it might be fun to share some of my recent cake creations with you. Let's just clarify one thing out though - I looove to bake, but when it comes to cake decorating my skills are more on the rustic side. Some of the cakes worked out better than others, but all of them were made with love!

It all kicked off in February while I was planning my daughter's 3rd birthday party. (Regular readers might remember my post about last year's party which was all about Paddington Bear). I made the mistake of perusing Pinterest with her to get some ideas for her Peppa Pig cake. As we scrolled through pages and pages of stunning, perfect fondant creations there were "oohs" and "ahhs", gasps of delight and lots of  "let's have that one mum!" I may have set the bar a little high!   

You can imagine the conversation: "No darling, I don't think a 4 tiered, perfectly iced extravaganza of a cake dotted with miniature models of ALL the show's characters is on the cards this year. Or the life size model of Peppa's house made completely out of balloons." Something along those lines!

After a lengthy discussion with the soon to be 3 year old it was decided that the cake would feature Fairy Peppa Pig. Unfortunately I ran out of time and had to construct her in a bit of a rush, but luckily dear daughter and friends were able to identify my fondant creation when the cake was presented. To be honest I was just relieved that she didn't change her mind about the theme 10 minutes before the party.

Fairy Peppa Pig

Not long after the Peppa celebrations I was asked by a friend to make her daughter's dinosaur birthday cake. We looked at a few ideas before settling on this cake. This is probably my favourite one as it was so much fun to assemble and really not difficult at all. I used a template that I found on the Betty Crocker website as a guide. Ta-dah!

RAWR! What do you mean you've never heard of a Smartiosaurus?

I made a short video showing how I assembled and decorated the dinosaur cake, you can watch it on my YouTube channel by clicking HERE.

Most of my daughter's friends were born within a few months of each other, which means a ton of parties over a short space of time! Not to mention a lot of birthday pressies to organise. Us parents are often looking for fun things to keep the kids busy, so I put together some cupcake baking kits for the birthday boys and girls. The kits were inspired by one of our favourite books: The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. Inside each kit was a set of prepackaged ingredients for the vanilla cupcakes, chocolate icing, as well as all of the decorations needed to make the Gruffalo's face. The best part for me has been receiving photos from friends of the final creations, it looked like everyone enjoyed their pressies. 

Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!

Inbetween all of the birthdays I also tried out some butterfly cupcakes (photo below). I was considering this as a cupcake kit for the girls, but in the end I couldn't resist making Gruffalos for everyone! It was round about the same time that I also made these Easter nest cupcakes for the Easter weekend, as well as this indulgent chocolate meringue cake which I featured on the blog earlier this year.

I wanted to make a simple cake to celebrate my son's baptism in May. About a week before the baptism tea I made some cute little fondant baby shoes using a template I found HERE. They were easy to put together and made a lovely cake topper.

The original plan was to make a chocolate layer cake with vanilla butter icing covered in fondant icing. Unfortunately the chocolate cake I made was much too fresh and soft to withstand the weight of the fondant... so it was on to Plan B! At about 6pm the night before the baptism I started on the second cake and it all worked out quite well. I decided on a naked vanilla cake topped with the shoes that I had made beforehand - here is the final result. 

Also in May we celebrated dear husband's birthday and he had put in a special request for his cake this year. If you are a fan of Pinterest then you definitely would have seen one of these before - a Kit Kat Smartie cake! The cake was very easy to assemble, and was a great way to use up the leftover smarties from all the Gruffalo kits I had been making. This is a very extravagant cake, but an absolute showstopper. Hubby's birthday also happened to coincide with World Baking Day which was perfect. 

Wow, that is a lot of celebrating... and a lot of cake! I hope you have enjoyed this round up of my latest baking efforts, and maybe you have seen some ideas for your next celebration cake. What have you been baking lately?