Sunday, August 26, 2012

a little birdy and a sweet girl

So still on the theme of birthdays I wanted to share with you the other cakes We made for the girls' birthdays.

My youngest is a bit of a 'hoot' fan from the ABC for kids channel, so for daycare we went with a yummy banana cake and maple flavoured frosting. From what I hear Maddy really loved it.



Then there was Ellawynne's school cake. I really wanted her to choose a cake design that she would love and enjoy decorating. As you can imagine she shows an interest so I really wanted her to enjoy and feel proud of her work too.

So after a few ideas being thrown around she choose a necklace and earrings cake from the latest womens weekly more kids cakes book. We adapted it a little design-wise and we chose a rainbow cake design based on the not quite nigella blog and had lots of fun making the necklace and covering cupcakes. There are some really nice ideas in the womens weekly book and lots for the kids to do or for you to try out.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Pudgy Princesses

Pudgy Princesses

It's funny how birthdays of your own children always come around so quick and take you by surprise. It doesn't matter that I had been thinking and prepping this birthday for a month or two before, it still crept up on me.

Now fortunately/unfortunately...depending on how you want to look at it, I have two birthdays to celebrate - 3 days apart..yes that is right, you heard me. And yes how lucky are we...both girls. Because the birthdays are so close together we decided to celebrate them with one party. But there was also the 'school' cakes too. 

But lets get to the party cake first. 

We decided to use a party venue this year and I am so glad we did! We chose Carnival Parties at Bulimba. What a fantastic place it is. I cannot recommend it enough. The children were entertained from the moment we stepped in and the place was decorated so beautifully. And the best thing of all..I got to relax and concentrate on the parts I love to do for parties, the cake and the goody bags (although they can help you out in that area too).


For the party we went with a pink/purple theme which is of course very 'girly'. I think our girls liked it as much as we did.


So for the cake we went with a castle theme which I also used on the invitations with two little girls, one in purple and one in pink, so I carried that theme through on the cake as well. 



The cake was a chocolate cake with a beautiful raspberry buttercream. I used real raspberries to make the puree for the buttercream and I love the tartness that comes through as it helps balance the sweetness of the buttercream.

The cake also had a banana cake tier with maple buttercream..yumm! The top tier of the cake and the towers and turrets are fake...I thought we had too much cake already.


I took the idea for this cake from a Debbie Brown book called Baby Cakes. I love this book, the designs are beautiful and I wanted to make the castle cake the first moment I saw it.