Cake Tour, Part 5

This was a really fun one, for my son's 8th birthday. I think I got the idea from a Wilton catalog. I baked the cake in a 9x13 pan, and I bought a box of white rolled fondant. I rolled out the fondant and cut out a 9"x13" piece to lay over the top of the frosted cake. To make the wood-looking floor, I painted it with food coloring.. just mixed up some brown food coloring in a small bowl with water to thin it out. The more water, the lighter the color. I used darker for the lines and mixed in some yellow for the "wood grain." Just used a regular small paintbrush.

I did the same thing with the rolled fondant jersey; it started out white and I painted on the purple, the piped the orange which gave it some nice depth (Phoenix Suns colors). "Draping" the jersey over the cake like this made it seem more realistic. I didn't have a ball-shaped pan so I actually baked two layers of 6" and one layer of 5" rounds, then stacked them and gave my artistic husband the task of carving them into a half-sphere. I think he did a mighty awsome job! I really like how this whole cake turned out.

My twin girls' 5th birthday cakes were not spectacular, but I'm posting them so you can see that by just owning several sizes of round cake pans, you can make some fun cakes. I always, always make two separate cakes for these girls so that nobody ever feels slighted in blowing out the candles. This was a princess party, and we just stuck a few plastic princess figures on top of the tiered cakes.


For Noah's 9th birthday I used a cupcake tower; the purpose of showing you this is the frosting. I used canned white frosting and colored it "flourescent" greenish-yellow. To make the blue stripey effect, I took an empty frosting bag and squirted a stripe of blue food coloring gel from the tip to the bag's opening. Then, I spooned the greenish frosting into the bag and piped some out onto a plate to get rid of any too-blue parts, then piped the cupcakes with a star tip, starting on the outside of the cupcake and working in. The frosting picks up the bright blue dye as it goes through the bag, making it nice and stripey. This would be fun to do with two colors too.



Just some 6" rounds for Zoe & Lucy in 2010. But I will share a few little techniques...

I knew I wanted to have tall, narrow cakes, but I only own two 6" rounds. I decided I wanted to put a full cake mix in each 6" round, which would make it overflow unless I did this:

Just cut a rectangle of parchment paper; spray the inside of the pan with Pam and the parchment will stick to it and stand up like this. Then, just pour the cake batter into each pan... the batter came just under the top of the pan, and when it baked it rose well above it but stayed a nice, cylindrical cake for me. I split each tall cake into four layers after cutting off the rounded tops.

After I'd made these, I posted the recipe on this blog for marshmellow rolled fondant. It tastes better than classic fondant and was very similar to work with. To make the Hello Kitty cut-outs I just rolled it out like cookie dough (dust the counter with powdered sugar) and carefully cut around a printed-out-on-cardstock Hello Kitty head with a paring knife. I colored small amounts of fondant with yellow, red, and black to make her nose, bow, and eyes.

We had cupcakes for the party guests; each cupcake was topped with one of these fondant Hello Kitty heads.

This post brings us up to date on all the cakes I've ever made for my kids that I thought were worth posting; for birthdays here on out, cakes will get their own post (if they're post-worthy, that is).