Micah's 2nd Birthday

With plans to move Micah's birthday to the cottage, I needed a cake that could travel.  But, when I ran across the new little trains released by the Thomas company, I knew I could make something work.  This cake focused again on the homemade fondant.  I wanted to see if I could make the colors dark enough (especially the black) and gain more experience working with the slightly different texture that homemade fondant has.  As with my previous cake, I used the gel food coloring and was able to use very little to get the bright colors I was looking for.  I also really like the flexibility of making shades and multiple colors without having to spend so much money.  With this cake, the black turned out nice and dark and got even darker as it stood for a while.

Micah loved the cake and barely let me get one picture in before he was playing with the trains.  Amazingly enough, the fondant even stood up to him playing trains on it!

Paige's 4th Birthday

Apparently ever little girl has a princess cake growing up.  I didn't, but when Paige asked for a pink princess cake, I decided to try my hand at what everyone said was a super simple shape cake.  I also decided to attempt to make my own fondant since that is supposed to be easy and I wanted various shades of pink which would be impossible to buy.  The cake was layered and carved from multiple sheet cakes.  It was a bit difficult to get the angles right without it crumbling on me, and it didn't quite reach high enough so the top needed to be pieced together.  Fortunately, a bunch of frosting held it together long enough for me to get the fondant on.  Making homemade fondant did indeed turn out to be very easy, the kids love the taste of it more than the store-bought stuff and it wasn't that much harder to work with.  I was even able to make various shades of color to add to the details of Sleeping Beauty.  By the time all the detail work was done, the lumpy dress barely showed through and the doll turned out to be pretty close to the real thing.  I am finding that I don't have the time and patience to do shaped cakes as well as I would like to (because of the time needed for refrigeration), but I will definitely look into doing the homemade fondant again.

Allie's 6th Birthday

Allie's request was for a mermaid cake.  She didn't care what it looked like as long as it had Sebastion, Ariel and Flounder on it.  Seeing as mermaids don't bend easily, the trick was to get the mermaid to look normal while not making the cake look cheesy.  I decided to focus on frosting and piping work again to try some of my new new tips.  The cake was an easy two layers, but with different sizes to help Arial lean into it without looking awkward.  The rest consisted of piping seaweed and underwater items using candy.  I love the contrast of the bright colors (thank you pre-made frosting) and Allie was thrilled with the characters. I'm finding that I enjoy the detail work of piping and might want to expand on my collection of piping tips so that I can develop this skill further.

Cody's 8th Birthday

For Cody's 8th Birthday I decided to expand on my work with fondant.  His request was for a Skylander cake, which ultimately was an easy design to work with.  This meant that I had time to work on the details of the texture that made the black look like stone.  Using a knife and fork I was able to give it a pretty good look and the contrast of black and white fondant made the cake turn out very sharp.  Cody loved it (maybe that was due to the Skylander toy we topped it with), but has decided that he does not like the taste of store-bought fondant.  I think I will look into homemade fondant for future cakes to see if that is as easy as they say.