Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Barbie Swan Lake

This is an older photo I just found in my basement last week. It's a dome-shaped cake with a Barbie stuck into it and decorated like Barbie Swan Lake. This is also one of the dairy-free cakes I did for my friend's daughter's birthday one year.

She turned out pretty cute, I think, but I could've done better with the royal icing on the doll's body. Not too bad for my first attempt at it, though. I learned a lot from doing that cake, so I do much better work now...Promise!

Friday, March 14, 2008

Baby's 1st Birthday



My neighbor's cousin's other cousin - (how's that for livin' in the South?) - called me a few weeks ago to see if I would be available to make a cake for her daughter's 1st birthday. When she sent me the image of the napkin from the paper products she was planning to use for the party, I immediately knew I'd done one previously for a friend in Arizona using the very same images. It's really cute, with pastel colors, flower, ladybug, butterfly, etc.

Anyway, she said it needed to be enough to feed 50 people, plus she wanted a "smash cake" for the birthday girl to dig into. So, this 2-layer French Vanilla cake is 12"x18" covered in buttercream, with decorations made of fondant. The "smash cake" is just a 6" round decorated as a flower, with a fondant bee on top.

It took me all day from start to finish - making the icing, crumb coating the cakes, making more icing, coloring icing, making fondant pieces, painting some of the fondant, affixing all the fondant decorations, and piping the details and borders. (Whew! It wears me out just typing all of that!)

She just came to pick up the cake with her sleeping baby in the backseat. I hope they enjoy their party tomorrow! And I hope you enjoy the photos!

(I just feel bad that my own kids never had such fancy cakes for their first birthdays!)