Super Mario 5th Birthday Cake

So my little brother is a whole five years old, it only feels like a couple of years ago that he born a week after I moved down to Southampton for University.  And now he is five. Every year there is a new craze and obsession, we've had In The Night Garden, Peppa Pig, Toy Story and now Super Mario, in fact Mario was his favourite character from last year, but he loved that cake so much, and the games still that he wanted another cake like it for this year.

Last year he got a single tier cake with a Mario stencil on top and screenshots around the side as can be seen in my post here. Both that one and this year's one was for his bowling party (can you tell he likes the Wii?) And I'm not going to lie, but I do like having the best cake at the bowling alley as there usually is a couple of other parties going on. Last year my only competition was one of those caterpillar shaped cakes..this year someone too made a Mario cake....luckily (and not nastily.....maybe) they had a big fondant figure on top - but it was quite droopy looking although the birthday girl loved it. I am quite competitive and I like to have the best cakes....children's party or not - it's war!

So anyway, this year I thought I would up the game. I had to do better than last year. I decided to go for a two tiered cake, vanilla sponge and thick buttercream - I thought just buttercream rather than adding jam as with kids it can often get messy and the buttercream works as a kind of cement and give the outside a nice smooth surface for the fondant icing.  I liked the screenshot idea, so I wanted to do more of that and again better with a years experience on it.

Rather than a big Mario on top, I drafted in my brother Joe to help me, he's really good at illustration etc so I let/made him do Mario and I think he came out perfect! I did a lot of the outside decoration but again I made Joe add the finishing touches with the icing pen and help with the ideas and positioning of some of the detailing.

I covered the cake in blue fondant made with Baby Blue Sugarflair colouring paste, I then used a two different greens for the hills, Mint Green and Holly Green so try to show depth. Good plain old white made up the cloud, to get the cartoony 2D feel I used two or three circles rolled out and laid on top of eachother for a really billowy look. I didn't want it too look too busy, so I added a few of the block with question marks with coins above (which I then used the icing pen on to get some shading.) I also made the big bullet coloured with Liquorice colouring paste, and mixed this with some white to get the grey to make the shading.

I aslo made the flower coming out of the pipe, a shell and one of those brown mushrooms you have to jump on in the game (I don't know the technical gaming names! sorry!) We also added a big star in the sky as these feature a lot in the game, and I had a big patch of sky to fill! I got joe to draw faces on the clouds and star like they have on the game which really made the cartoon factor stand out.

I took about 8 hours all together to make the icings, ice the cake and then actually decorate! I obviously had to add the big number 5 on the front! His reaction was great when he saw it finished, considering he had actually seen it a bit earlier so there wasn't the big element of surprise. It came out a lot better than I imagined, he loved it, I'm happy I won the cake war at the bowling alley and now all I have to worry about it is.....what do I bake next year!?!
(bottom left picture is Joe, Josh and Me)

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Chelsea Football Birthday Cake

So this week my task was to make a birthday cake for a boy turning ten, and he loves Chelsea.
So they asked for a cake with the badge on, I was a little worried about this as I hadn't done a badge before, and they can be very fancy and fiddly, and they have to be perfect! I decided the best way to do it was to make a stencil, so I printed the badge off the internet and used that as a guide.

The cake itself was Bournville cake, the best baking chocolate that there is I think. With chocolate buttercream, again, very important, only ever make buttercream with BUTTER! You can always taste the difference, don't skimp. I dirty iced it Cake Boss style on my icing turntable, which is amazing (and from Lakeland). I usually make Victoria sponge cakes so cover them with jam, however buttercream made it a lot easier to put the fondant on and gave it a smoother look which you don't get with jam.

I covered the cake in white fondant as thats the main background colour on the badge, then using dark blue fondant I laid out the cut out figure and with a very shark knife cut around it. I managed to do it in one piece apart from what it's holding which was brilliant.

The lettering used was with patchwork tappit cutters. They font was quite similar to the one of the badge so it worked really well. These are really tricky to use and hard to get out clean so I had to spend ages finely cutting away excess to clean up the egdes.

I was really happy with how it turned out in the end, and adding the name Jacob around the end to personalise it a bit. I also didn't write Chelsea Football Club on it, but opted for Happy Birthday as it looked a bit more celebratory. Pin It Now!

Seriously Girly Birthday Cake!

OK, I have been bad with posting over Christmas, so I'll make up for it and catch you up. Since I last wrote it has been my best friends birthday. She has been my best friend for the past 9 years so she deserved a brilliant cake as a little surprise!

I bought a lovely book called Cake Chic over Christmas and all of the cakes were impossibly pretty and girly, and I couldn't decide which one to do so I chose a few and merged them. Inspired by cameo cakes I ordered a silicone mould off eBay.

So for the seriously girly cake I made a two tiered victoria sponge cake with pink raspberry buttercream. I iced it with fondant coloured with Sugarflair paste in Claret.

For the cameos I filled the mould with white fondant so it covered the whole of the mould on the outside too, then placed it in the freezer for 15 minutes. When frozen I popped it out and cut around it so it was in an oval shape. And repeated this about 8 times. For the frame and bows I mixed cocoa powder into white fondant and added a little black icing to get a darker brown. I also had icing dots to add on the brown icing frame, but did this when on the cake as they would get ruined when pressed onto the cake. I then piped the pearls on, did some looping piping inbetween the cameos and adding some silver balls to make it a bit fancy. These went onto the bottom tier.

For the top I used a button effect. Mixing separate colour of pink, chocolate and plain in icing, I rolled the icing out and using different sized icing nozzles, cute out circles, then using a smaller one I indented an outline on the cut out to give the button look. Then I pushed a toothpick in four times for the holes, and there you go buttons.

For extra effect I made some lilac icing and rolled it out into strips, and using a toothpick I made a stitch pattern along the sides so it looked like ribbon.  Then laying the ribbon over the top tier so it looked like a wrapped up present I put four buttons inbetween each ribbon piece, and also on top inbetween and then one on the join. I did make a bow to put on top but it broke!

I then went for some old school fancy piping to look like pearls inbetween the ribbons. It look ages! But happy as it looks cute! At the bottom of each tier I piped more pearls around the base so it looked a bit like a necklace. I then dusted it all with shimmer so it looked glittery! Pin It Now!