Big cakes are fun!


More and more we’ve found ourselves turning to big cakes for fun, and with our son’s first birthday approaching, Mark and I decided to put our imagination to the test.

It started back in March when our friend Noah turned one. We begged his Mum to let us make him a jungle cake – a four tier high chocolate cake with fondant shaped like a canopy of leaves on top, sugar tree trunks up the side and animals looking out through the tree branches. It was such an easy and fun cake to make, we knew immediately we could adapt the design to lots of different ideas.

We had a chance to repeat the jungle cake shortly after for a friend’s fifth birthday – albeit it without dairy. We were delighted to find replacing the butter in both the cake and icing had no impact on flavour or shape-ability. We swapped out the fondant tree tops for a piped royal icing instead and voila, our cake began to evolve.



For our boy’s birthday, we knew we wanted an under water theme. I envisaged a blue cake with mottled blue and white icing on top to emulate waves, a wrap around the bottom to indicate sand, and a host of sea creatures plastered round the sides. It was so much fun shaping starfish and an octopus out of fondant. We used fish lollies for extra fun, and shaped dolphins out of pastilage for the top.




It was so much fun making a cake like this, I’ve decided to hold a “Build A Birthday Cake” class next year. It would be a four week class – three to make the various decorations, and a final one on one tutorial and people’s home to help them build their final cake. Stay tuned for more info further down the track!

Update: we finally had a chance to try this design out on what we've dubbed the Fairies of the Forest cake. A friend's little girl was celebrating her birthday and christening on the same day. Her grandmother was baking the birthday cake so we were charged with creating a christening cake big enough to feed 80 people! Enter the Fairies in the Forest, complete with toadstools, dragonflies and a multitude of butterflies!



Continuing on with the stacked cake theme, we were lucky in December to land an order for a Batman cake. Since my husband is a mad Batman fan, he had a personal stake in the outcome of this cake design. We put our heads together and came up with this cake for a little boy's fifth birthday celebration:



We also made a bunch of mini cupcakes for him to share with his friends at school. Apparently he found it hard to give the Batman rings to his friends - since it was his birthday, he thought they should all be his!

Comments

Anonymous said…
It is imperative that we read blog post very carefully. I am already done it and find that this post is really amazing. bakery bentonville ar

2:57 am
EduLaunchers said…
Nice post. Most Trusted Study Abroad Visa Consultants in India
10:56 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marshmallow Sherbet Cones

Image
I have always been a big fan of sherbet in the many forms it comes in. As a kid, I loved those sherbet cones you bought from the corner store – semi solidified sherbet in a stale cone, with chewy marshmallow on the top, coated in hundreds and thousands. I also loved Wiz Fizz – fruity sherbet in a glassine bag with a little plastic shovel. I’d most often buy these on the way home from the pool, because they were only five cents. Unfortunately, my hands were usually still wet from the pool, turning the bag to a sloppy mess before I could eat its entire contents. For my 10th birthday my mum decided to include homemade sherbet cones on the menu. Thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly recipe cards, we had the recipe for sherbet and marshmallow, albeit, on different cards. My clever mum bought flat bottomed square cones, half filled them with sherbet and then topped them with pink or green marshmallow. Of course each had a liberal sprinkling of hundreds and thousands. In my explo...
Read more

White Chocolate Ganache

Image
I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope. If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married. As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When...
Read more

Road Test: Sunbeam Mixmaster v Kenwood Patissier

Image
Back in 2003 when I began my most recent baking odyssey, I acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster – the remake of the classic retro mixer from the fifties. My mother had a Mixmaster which she bought in the seventies, and which I did most of my cake baking with as a teenager (when the obsession truly took hold). She still has that Mixmaster today, although it is significantly worse for wear – the plastic cover over the light is broken and they haven’t made the bulbs for years, so there’s a “live” cavity where the light bulb should be. I can vouch for that because I stuck my finger in there accidentally last year and got a nice shock from it. I paid quite a lot of money for my Mixmaster and it held pride of place on my kitchen bench for three years. That is until I had it running one Sunday and one of the motors blew up! I discovered that the twin motor “600 watt” power it claimed worked in two ways: 1. to run the beaters; 2. to turn the turntable the bowl sits on. After seeing flames shooting fro...
Read more