Train Cake

One of our favourite rituals is to look through the Woman's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book for birthday cake inspiration. I have two of them, the vintage and the modern. I love looking at how fashion has changed over time. The buttercream icing, natural colours and terrible photography has given way to pretty fondant icing, beautifully worked, and photographed on attractive backgrounds. The Vintage gets my vote, every time. They feature cakes that I have an outside shot at actually achieving, and being an under-achiever, I feel comforted by that.  With a train cake in each book, it was only a matter of time before a train cake was commissioned. I am only surprised that it took 10 years.

I fell back on my trusty formula of buying slab cakes, covering them in egg white icing and smothering them in sweets. Once a cake is covered with sweets, no-one looks at anything else.

Cake Bases

The engine is made up of two madeira cakes and one swiss roll. One madeira cake is sliced lengthwise as the base of the tank. The swiss roll goes on top of that. The second madeira cake is sliced in half widthwise. Cut sides go face down on the board to be the base of the driver's carriage. The first cake is then laid on top of that an trimmed down to be the roof of the driver's carriage.

The two carriages are just single slab cakes. Lemon drizzle, in this case. The funnel is a section of Cadbury Mini Roll and the wheels are Oreos.

Icing

I spent literally one and a half hours mixing up the red icing. One and a half hours! For just the engine! I read bloggers who say, "I whipped up these cookies in about an hour." The ones that are each decorated with piped icing, in 5 different colours, all piped and flooded and decorated in 5 different patterns. How? I can't even mix the icing in less than an hour, let alone mix batter, cut out cookies, bake cookies, make outline icing in 5 different colours, make filler icing in 5 different colours fill piping bags and pipe the 5 different designs. That's about 25 hours of work for me. But, back to the horrible red icing. There reason I say horrible is because of the quantity of food colouring in it. The base is egg white icing. I had paste colour called Scarlet, but was a pinkish red. Even with the entire jar of paste in there (gross), it was still only pink. So I had a rummage through my cupboards and turned up another bottle of food colouring in red. Expiry 2008.  A few drops made no difference so in went the whole bottle. (Eeew!) I decided I'd better not let the kids eat the red icing. But it was still pink. I found another bottle of red, from colouring easter eggs in about 2009. Use by 2010. (No problem!) 

Actually, there was a huge problem with putting so much colour in the icing. It went very runny. I've had this happen before, and it is the reason that I have switched to only buying paste colour. I could not get the red to set. The next day, I iced the cake and you could see every contour of the cakes underneath. I mixed up the rest of my egg white powder and put that in. Back to a pink shade. A few drops of yellow took the bubblegum sheen off the pink, but it was still pink. The texture was improved and at least I could get the cake covered. I spent the next few hours scraping icing off the board as it poured off the cake. I didn't dare decorate it yet.

Instead, I did the two carriages. They are fondant icing that my supermarket was selling pre-coloured. Hooray! I just rolled it out and laid it over the top of the two cakes. I was smarter with the green one, to tuck in the bottom so the raw edges weren't on show. I covered up the blue one with twists of red liquorice. 

Decorating

The red liquorice was used on the blue carriage to hold the smarties in place. The chocolate biscuits on the green one are just laid in place. Luckily, I had set aside some white icing which I used to stick the smarties on to the wheels. Otherwise we would never have got to the party!

Another Jungle Cake

Eldest does not remember her 4th birthday party where she had the first Jungle Cake, so she asked for one for her 9th birthday. I looked out the pictures of the other one and she was very impressed, so we made something very similar.

I was able to make it much smaller - her 4th had 20 children, plus parents - so I just made two layers of chocolate cake in a square tin. I made the cakes and the fondant leaves the weekend before and froze them. The leaves were much quicker too, I started cutting out before all the colouring was mixed into the icing and I really like the variegated effect. The colour mixes in more evenly as you re-roll the icing for more leaves, so I was able to get different leaf colours without actually adding any more colouring. I cut all the leaves freehand, so it went a lot quicker too. I was disappointed that they flopped in the humidity and lost most of their lovely curliness.

The pond is a bit too uniform to be a proper jungle pond, I should have made it meander more, but the honeycomb rocks are just too delicious to skimp on. The pond glitter was left over from the Frozen Cake, but it is just perfect for water instead of ice. The snake sweets are always hugely popular with children and we had a lot of fun positioning them slithering up the sides of the cake. They were also extremely handy for filling in the gap at the bottom of the cake. Can you see one under the trees?

Jungle Cake

This cake is from my "archives", ie, before I had this blog.  I made it a couple of years ago for a 4 year old's birthday when green was the order of the day.

She selected her cake from my trusty Woman's Weekly cake decorating book and I did use quite a few of the ideas from it.

I started with the template for the jungle leaves and made loads of them from ready to roll royal icing. I invested in some new paste colour, Spruce Green, and it came out much better than my liquid colour.  I'm going to go with paste from now on.  When I got bored with cutting out all the little sections from the leaf template, I just freehanded my own leaf design.  Before they dried, I scored a blunt knife down the centre to look like a vein.

I was very fortunate that we had bought a new fridge the week before and the old one was standing, unplugged in my kitchen. Aside from being a huge eyesore, it was extremely convenient as a set of shelves for storing all those leaves as they dried. I really don't know where else I might have put them to dry.

The leaves were the most tedious part, the rest was pretty simple.  I used loads of cake mixes, some chocolate, some vanilla, to make the base slab; covered it with spruce green buttercream icing; made a blue watering hole out of a scrap of royal icing; and then started layering all those leaves.  I added some jelly snakes through the layers and the kids loved them.

I added some sections of Flake chocolate bars around the sides of the cake to look like tree trunks and I used crushed honeycomb pieces for the banks of the watering hole.  I cheated on the jungle animals and just used (washed) plastic toy animals.  I found the cute jungle candles at Party Pieces.

The four year olds loved the cake, they were grabbing at it before I even lit the candles. Before I served the cake, they wanted to play with it and the animals got smooshed around in the watering hole!  Little horrors!

Frozen Ice Palace Cake

  

Elsa's powers are great indeed. How did she build an ice palace in less than 2 minutes, with no engineering help? My cake version took significantly longer and was structurally questionable. But it tasted good and the kids were happy, so it all worked out well!

I started with my previous effort at a cake castle, covering upturned ice cream cones with icing. Elsa’s palace is very tall and rounds towards the top, so I planned a stack of cakes with a small, rounded cake at the very top. This one was baked in a Pyrex mixing bowl. The other three are layers of round cakes.

I’ve learned a new trick which is to make party cakes as a marbled cake. This way, each child thinks their slice is more exciting and they don’t go as crazy clamouring for the icing. I’m going to stick with this plan in future. It is not so much extra work, it just involves mixing up and pouring out the vanilla cake batter, then making up a chocolate batter and adding that to the top of each pan. A tiny stir with a knife is all the marbling it needs.

So I had my stack of three round cakes, pudding cake on top and ice cream cone on top of that. I also iced a “tree” with white icing and put that to one side for later. But it needed a balcony. I didn’t get a special cylinder cake tin, instead I cheated and bought a swiss roll cake and leaned it up against the side. Unfortunately, this cake let me down a bit. It was too light and not dense enough to take the weight of the icing. Despite quite a few skewers driving through the middle, it is still the leaning tower of Piza.

I used up all the white icing in the first layer of icing. (The “crumb coat”, as it is known in the parlance.) So it was going to have to be all turquoise. My royal icing mixture was too runny. I wanted it dribbling down the cake in an iceberg effect, but mine was more like a slow moving river than a glacier. Then the humidity climbed as it started to rain and my icing started to properly pool on the cake board. I spent rather too long scooping it off the board and re-dribbling it down the cake. You can see the mess on the board, and the perfectly visible lines of the cake layers and the patterns on the cones. Much too runny!

It eventually dried over night and the fondant icing and snowflake cutter saved the cake in the end. Despite my loathing of working with fondant, I bought a roll of ready to go white fondant and a snowflake cutter set. Hooray for not having to colour a block of fondant, or having to roll it. The cutters actually worked great. They were well worth the high cost of next day shipping (twice the price of the actual cutters!) Cutting out those hundreds of snowflakes (I didn't have time to count them) didn’t take that long, and I stuck them on the cake on the day of the party. They covered all the icing boo boos and added a great turquoise and white effect to the cake. Plus, I got my balcony properly set out. A round piece of fondant with a snowflake stamped on the surface using the largest cutter painted with food colouring.

Making special occasion cakes is definitely a three day process for me. I make all the cakes a week, or more, ahead, and freeze them, well wrapped. Day 2 is mixing the icing, as the cakes defrost. Then two layers of icing, and cutting out all those decorations. On the day of the party, I stuck the snowflakes on, dusted all with icing sugar and took the cake to the party. I waited till I got there before I attached the top of the balcony and added the white snowballs to the edge.

I don’t mind that my cakes look home made – I hope I am in the vicinity of home made but looking good!

Garden Cake

Probably one of my best piping efforts to date. I was lucky in that I finally had the right consistency for piping the edges. I also learned that it is not possible to pipe on to the cake direct, it is so much easier to pipe on to a layer of icing.

The top row of piping was a necessity to cover the join between the two colours of icing. I'm afraid I did not make the flowers, I buy them ready made.

Teddy Bear Cake

Fairy Castle Cake

For a fairy party, what other cake should be made but a Fairy Castle?  (Thank goodness I didn't have to make a fairy!)

I had a few sources of inspiration for this.  I have two Woman's Weekly children's cake decorating books. One is a re-released vintage one and the other is modern.  It is amazing to see how much has changed. The biggest difference I notice is how the vintage one is all buttercream icing and the modern one is almost exclusively royal icing, which gives a much smoother, more professional looking result.

There's just one hitch: I hate kneading royal icing!  I have started going with a version of my own, also called Fluffy Frosting, using egg whites, a splash of lemon juice, the colouring and lots and lots of icing sugar.  My top tip for cake decorating is always make way more icing than you think you will need. Like, double. You will use it.

The other source of inspiration was a cake from my own childhood, made by my mother for my younger brother's birthday. I remember this vividly because my mother had made it and left it on the counter until the party. I was looking at it and decided that there was a bit of messy icing on the board, so I scooped it away with my finger and ate it.  I then proceeded to "neaten" almost all the icing around the edges of the cake! Once I'd finished the edges, the join between the turrets and the cake looked messy, so I neatened that too. Do you know the funniest part? I don't remember getting into enormous trouble! I am pretty sure I made the cake look awful but maybe my mother was too busy with the party to notice at the time.  Anyway, the episode has stuck in my mind. I must have been about 5 at the time.  Sorry Mum!

So the castle was going to be a cake with upturned ice cream cones. 4 years is the perfect age for this because the four turrets are great candle holders.  I knew I wanted height for the base cake but I wasn't catering for huge numbers of children so I didn't want to make a large slab cake for the base.  I don't have any square cake pans, and I didn't want to create extra crumbs by cutting and building up sections of cake, so I used a round cake tin for the base. I love to see the in-progress photos of other's cakes so here's mine of the cake and the cones without any icing:

You can see the decorating ingredients hanging around, waiting to be used.  I buy a cheap cake mix (yes, the cheapest, no-name cake mix in the store - it is actually really, really good), I used 4 in total, make my own icing and I do spend up on lots of decorations. I also always over-buy because I am never quite sure exactly what I am going to use on the day.  The smarties didn't get used in the end, but they are a great backup and will always be readily eaten at the party, if they don't make it on to the cake.

To get the candles to sit on the turrets, I poked a hole in the bottom of each cone with a knitting needle. Then I iced each cone and sprinkled glitter sprinkles all over it.  I wedged the candle in the top and added more icing if needed.  Then I left them to dry.  I transported them to the party separately and put them on top of the cake just before serving. They are not iced into place.

I used lots of icing around the sides of the main cake, the cakes rose a lot in the oven and I cut them down a little, but there were still lots of gaps to fill.  I didn't want to fill the bottom gap with icing and I was about to cover the space with a ribbon when I realised that the marshmallows would make perfect foundation stones for the castle. So I stuffed the underside gaps with marshmallows and added more to the plate before serving.

I used Toblerone pieces for the castellations, Cadbury Dream Fingers for the door/drawbridge and added sugar flowers and wafer butterflies around the sides. 

Birthday present wrap-up

I got quite a few handmade things ready in time for the August birthday.  I resisted the urge to give, and photograph, them immediately, and instead put them away for the special day.  Now that we have celebrated the birthday, I can finally take photographs of all the gifts in action.

First, the Butterfly Dress.  It fitted great and looked so adorable.  She wore it for her birthday tea party.

It also looked fab with the Ocean Waves Cardigan.  The two were perfect together, especially with the collar of the dress over the top.

Then finally, the long-awaited Scooter Basket.  The two girls look so cute scooting together with their bright baskets stuffed full of furry animals.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

 

Some Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing for Little One's birthday tea.

I'm afraid that these are far from perfectly home made.  I used a cake mix and bought the sugar flowers.  But I did pipe the icing (special occasions only).

The "real" birthday cake is coming later this week.  The cake request for her party is a Fairy Castle Cake.  I start tomorrow, wish me luck!

Fabric Bunting

This bunting (a.k.a. garland, pennants) is very sentimental to me.  It marks my official re-entry into sewing.  I was inspired to buy a (very cheap) sewing machine, shopped online for fabric and bias binding and did some web research for construction inspiration.

Bunting is pretty much an English/British institution and it is so, so popular.  With the Queen's Jubilee and the London Olympics, 2012 was the year of bunting.  But everything available in the shops is either made of paper or plastic and none of it is more than 10 flags long.  If you can even find fabric, it is really expensive.

That's not to say that my string came out cheap, I probably paid about £35 for fabric, binding and shipping (not counting tools like pinking shears and tailor's chalk) and it took me a month of evenings to cut out and sew it up.  But I do have over 30m of the cutest bunting ever!

I made it for a 5th birthday which we were hosting at a venue.  Pink, pink and more pink was in demand.  We were using a pretty drab conference room with nasty curtains and lots of veneer panelling, so it need some dressing.  The bunting fit around 3 entire walls of the room with only the doors to the garden not covered.  We were lucky that the venue were really relaxed about us hanging things.  In fact, they had a pinboard rail mounted high up for this purpose.  (These things are worth checking before you spend a month sewing 30m of bunting but I didn't and was just lucky.)  The party room pictures are still pretty blah so I've posted a different picture taken when we hung the bunting at home for the actual birthday day.  Since then, it has also decorated other party venues including a local cafe, our garden and a booth at the school fair.  (It went to a friend's wedding but it was a bit too pink for their taste.)

I cut myself a cardboard template for the flags, they are 20cm wide at the top and 25cm long.  I traced around the template with tailor's chalk and then cut out the flags with pinking shears.  A rotary cutter with ruler would have made this part of the job faster.  I then sewed the two long sides, trimmed the corner, turned right side out and poked out the corners with a knitting needle before pressing flat.  (Actually, I pressed the seams flat inside first and then pressed the outside.)

Since I was making double sided flags, I got about 4-5 flags out of .5m of fabric.  Single sided works fine and you get twice as many flags with about half the work. You could also use a cheaper, plain fabric for the backs of the flags and save the prints for the front.  I wanted it to be double-sided so I could hang it through the centre of a room. 

I chose polycotton from Online Fabrics because they had a great range of prints and they sold by the .5m so I could get more prints into the string.

I sewed each flag to the binding at intervals of 10cm.  Tip: fold the next flag in 1/2 and you have the distance between each space.  I have to confess that the zig-zag stitch idea wasn't mine.  During my research, I came across Sew Sweet Violet on Etsy.  If you want to buy some gorgeous fabric bunting, buy from her.  The running zig-zag is very forgiving when you sew out of alignment and the contrast thread adds extra interest to the string.  The binding gets folded in half and the raw edge of the flag attached inside.  I didn't press the binding in half before I pinned but you would need to with very fine binding.  Actually, sewing tape, ribbon, or strips cut on the straight grain would probably be a more practical string for the bunting, bias tape stretches more and curves away as you sew.  Violet also does the most gorgeous ends on her bunting.  Needless to say, I did not make padded shapes to dangle from the ends, but I should have.

After I made the length I needed for the party (ie, filled a whole roll of binding), I went to town and appliqued their names on a string each.  I had to buy heavier, quilting weight cotton for this, applied spray starch and also used a sheet of tissue paper to stop the stitches from forming a tunnel.  The final applique still has a bit of puckering around the letters, but it is not too noticable when it is hung up.  

I drew the letters freehand with chalk and cut them out on scraps from the main string.  Then I made up each flag in the same way as before.  I added one flag at each end in the same fabric as the letters.

I did another bunting project for the aforementioned wedding and my friend did a superb job sourcing all kinds of odds and ends of free fabric for her flags.  I ended up working with a book of curtain/upholstery samples, men's shirts, pajama bottoms and a floral top from the charity shop.  It was fun seeing it all come together on the day.

Gingerbread House Birthday Cake

Yes, I know it is not Christmas but if the 6 yo wants a Gingerbread House for her birthday, then that is what the lady gets!

Even without the festive cheer, I did have fun making this.  I like to give myself about 3 days to make a gingerbread house to allow for overnight chilling of the mixture and another night for setting of the icing, then decorating on the 3^rd day.

I used this gingerbread recipe from Butter Hearts Sugar, and a lot of her decorating ideas too.  I devised my own template from merging lots of internet browsing of other’s templates.  I used a Woman’s Weekly recipe for the royal icing, and, yes, I use real egg whites instead of meringue powder.  It doesn’t come out as smooth and glossy as the powder but, here in the UK, I have only found the powder available by mail order and it is pretty expensive.

I went a bit mad buying sweets for this cake.  You can't see most of them because I filled the inside, like a treasure chest.  On impulse, I also bought a can of this silver spray glitter, not knowing quite how I might use it.  But, once I started, I couldn't stop and I ended up spraying (and re-spraying!) all the walls and roof silver.  It helped to hide my uneven mixing and baking on the finished surfaces.  The red roof tiles are string candy, cut into smaller lengths and fastened only at each end with the loops hanging loose.  I loved the idea of making heart shapes from candy canes so I saved some from Christmas and also used them for the windowsills.  I always run out of patience when I am piping icing so I didn’t make the edges as pretty as most other cakes, I just stuck silver balls along the mortar lines instead.

E was very pleased with her cake, it was what she ordered after all.  Putting the candles along the ridgepole was fun and added more height and drama.  They would also look cute planted in the garden.   

Bonus: it was so easy to serve, just break off a chunk and grab a handful of candy.