F's 2nd Birthday Koala Brothers Cake

I was really pleased with how F's birthday cake turned out. It may not be aerodynamically correct but it looked kinda right and most importantly F loved it when I showed it to him the morning of his party.

I know this as in the nano second I popped out of the room he managed to climb back up on the dining room chair and help himself to a red propeller... and had eaten half of it before my return... including the dried spaghetti (used as support) inside it! Luckily I had some red icing left so we made another before putting the cake out of his reach.

I baked two 6 x 12 inch cakes the weekend before last & filled them with Marks & Spencer's hedgerow jam (mixture of berries) after they'd cooled. I cut about 3 inches off the end of each cake to be the wings and stuck the remaining two large rectangles that were now about 9 x 6 inches on top of each other with more jam to make a high cake for the plane's body. After individually wrapping them in tinfoil they went into the freezer for the rest of the week.

Friday night was cake assembly night... It may sound weird to freeze the cakes but it really does help. Apart from keeping the cake itself fresher for longer it also means the frozen solid cakes are much more stable to carve into shapes without corners crumbling off. There were plenty of cake shavings for us to try after I'd finished carving the wings and the aeroplane body :) too.

I covered a 16 inch square drum board very thinly with sky blue ready roll icing and used butter cream to stick all the cakes in position. More butter cream was applied to the whole aeroplane shape to act as 'glue' for the yellow ready roll icing. At this point I called it a night... quitting before anything went wrong as it was 10.30pm.

Saturday evening was the finishing touches...

The plane's blue nose is just a disc of ready roll icing stuck on to the yellow icing with water. The red propellers are made of solid icing with a rod of dried spaghetti inside for support as are the yellow nose cone, back wings and windscreen.

Frank & Buster were a bit more of a challenge and I cheated a bit here. I stuck the red cockpit seats to the outside of the cake so I'd only need to make a head & torso for each of them. The last things to make were some marbled solid icing clouds and a ribbon of red ready roll for the banner.

My cheat for piping the lettering is to 'write' the lettering with a cocktail stick first and then use it as a guide for you to follow to do the piping.

The cake was demolished Sunday afternoon within minutes. Great fun to make but never around for long when finished!

Gearing up for F's 2nd birthday

We had a relaxing day today... well deserved as this week has been exceptionally manic with errands & various appointments. We headed off to meet up with friends and see the old fashioned steam fair on our beach lawns. F decided he preferred to look at the rides and flat out refused to go on anything. So we stood and watched his 3 pals have a ball! While they were on the mini cars we went off to the hook a floating duck stall. F's prize for catching a big yellow duck on the hook at the end of a long stick was a bottle of bubbles.... and he was delighted. We spent the rest of the afternoon with buckets and spades on the beach making sandcastles for the little ones to demolish before they'd hardly left the bucket!

On the way home we wondered up the grand pier walkway for the first time since it's recent opening. We made a donation to the pier fund, bought a couple of Mr Whippy ice creams with flakes and saw close up what's now left of the pavilion. I was really glad to see the walkway full with lots of people... sitting having an ice cream or cuppa & just watching the world go by and not just heading for the wreckage at the end.

Well I'd better be off as tonight I've got to get cracking with F's birthday cake. I have to decorate the cake board to look like sky with clouds and start carving out the koala brothers plane pieces from the cakes I froze last weekend. I've never tried doing a plane before so I have no idea how this is going to turn out. But I've got plenty of source material (F's dvd's) and all the colours of icing I need so fingers crossed I'll manage something half decent. I promise to take photos of the process & I'll post them next time.