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.