Birthday time

I know I have mentioned it before but one of the things I love is that I now have 2 wonderful children I get to call my own when they are with Rory and I.  Alex and Aurora are at the perfect age to just have fun.  Last year I had a major fail for Aurora's birthday cake. Mostly because the flour that I used for the cake was supposedly very old.  I am not so sure because I haven't attempted to make that cake since then and I didn't save the recipe.  This year, I wasn't about to take my chances on the cake so I took the lazy man's way and used a boxed cake.  While boxed cakes are quick and easy, I still prefer making them from scratch but these are children and they will never know the difference, right?  When I was in culinary school I made my nephew a train cake.  I had a blast making the cake and my nephew LOVED his cake.  It was a cake that my sister and I worked on together.  Later that year my sister told me about her successful attempt at making a princess cake for my niece. I let the inspire me to go ahead and make some fun cakes for the kids this year for their birthday.  I did go to culinary school after all and baking and pastry was my forte.  Aurora wanted a princess cake and Alex wanted a batman cake. 

I borrowed my friends princess bowl kit so I could make the bottom part of the dress.  That's where I got frustrated because I mixed the cake mix and put it in the pan. Problem was, the cake didn't rise as high as I was expecting.  Actually, it barely rose at all.  I wasn't counting on that at all.  (and that's why I choose to  make my cakes from scratch) I went ahead and froze the one I made and decided that I would make another one to see how that worked out.  The bad thing is, my mother in law called me while it was baking and I got side-tracked and forgot about the cake and it burned. Fortunately it didn't matter anyway because it didn't rise any more than the other one.  I decided to make just a standard round cake and let it be a "platform" for the princess to stand on. Of course the dress had to be pink and white.

The next challenge with the cake was the fact that I had less time to make it than I planned on.  The phone call that I received from my mother in law was to ask if we could move the party to that evening instead of the next day.  We were planning on having it at her home and we really didn't have much of a choice at that point.  I said I could make it work and would work on the cake that afternoon and we'd head over after I picked Rory up from work. About 1:00 I started to make the frosting for my cake.  I had the round cake in the oven and the top part of the dress in the freezer.  When the "platform" came out of the oven, I let it cool slightly and then put it on a cooling rack and put it in the freezer to cool it down enough to put a crumb coat on it without the crumbs going all over the place.  I looked at several photos on google of the bodice of the dress and many of them looked like they were made out of fondant.  Since I was making mine completely out of frosting, I had to come up with a way to make it look good.  I couldn't really use a knife or mini off-set spatula because it wouldn't work right.  I decided to use small dots for the entire top half.

Around 2:30 I had to take an hour off and go pick up Alex from school. We got home by 3:30 so I had an hour left before I had to pick up Rory and then head to the party.  The entire time I am decorating the cake.  Aurora is standing on her step stool next to me trying to "help", and eating the frosting off the cake.  I can't count how many times I had to say, "don't touch". Alas, I rushed to the end and managed to complete it before we had to rush out the door.  It certainly was far from perfect but it was with a 4 year old standing next to me and my having to deal with inturruptions, it didn't turn out too bad.

Alex's cake was a whole different story.  I told him I would make him a batman cake.  I looked at google images and decided that I was just going to do the bat logo.  It looked easy enough and I could add a couple other things to make it look cool.  I decided to let Alex look at the pictures on google images and told him he could pick the cake he wanted.  We looked at several.  He liked several tiered cakes and I told him those were too big.  So he looked at the smaller cakes and of course he picks the cake that has the animated batman on the top of the cake.  I didn't want to say no, so that's the cake we stuck with. 

Fortunately, one of the few talents  I have is the ability to look at a picture and sketch it.  It's not always perfect but I can at least get it close and then adjust the lines as needed.  I decided that I would sketch out the cake on paper using the picture as a guide.  The picture had his back hand/arm much smaller than I liked so I drew mine a little larger. It was far from an artist's artwork but it was sufficient for me to look at to make the cake.  The next challenge was to figure out how to get the image onto the cake.  I thought about using wax paper and somehow tracing the image in frosting and then put it on top of the cake but then the image would need to be mirrored to be right on the cake.  That could also have gotten really messy.  Then my friend suggested drawing it with a toothpick on the cake.  I had already been thinking along those lines but her idea was definitely the winner. So, using the picture as a guide, I used the toothpick to draw my lines on the crumb coat.

The next part was the challenge.  I unfortunately only had liquid food coloring.  It works fine when you want a lighter shade of whatever color you are trying to acheive.  The picture of the cake used black, blue, and gray for the colors of his suit.  I was only going to use black which made a challenge for some of my lines.  The other problem with the liquid food coloring is the fact that it's liquid and I am using it in a frosting where you want as little liquid as possible for the frosting consistancy.  The lighter colors were just fine but as soon as you start adding more color to your frosting, you start to look the frosting consistancy.  Rory helped make the frosting while I was decorating with some of the lighter colors.  Eventally he used all the food coloring and I decided it would have to work. I used my small cake spatula to spread the frosting into the smaller corners and the toothpick for the finer details of the logo and his eyes.  For my first attempt at a cake of this sort, it turned out okay, but I am a perfectionist and can see what could have been better.  There is always next time. Alex was happy with it and that's all that matters.