Cake Creations

Although I am far from a cake decorating expert, I have made a number of them for friends and family for birthdays and other occasions over the last few years and thought I might share some of them with you. I still need to work on my icing technique, but was happy with how these turned out.

One of my first attempts at making a 'special' cake was for my sisters’ birthday a few years ago when she had a sports themed birthday. To go with the theme I made her a cake that looked like a pair of sandshoes.  I found the idea in a book from the library and personalised it from there.

 

 

For my Best Friends birthday I made this simple cake with a bow and gift tag on it. I simply cut out the strips of the bow and used rolled paper to hold its shape until the icing went hard. And the swirls were wrapped around wooden spoon handles.

 

I surprised my husband for his birthday one year with the below fishing cake. The boat isn’t great because I didn’t give myself a lot of time to make it but he was happy with it. The rocks were chocolate stones I bought so everything was edible except for the fishing pole which was made from a bamboo skewer and string.

 

Probably the most time consuming decorations I’ve ever made for a cake were for my sons first birthday under the sea cake. I died the icing myself and created different creatures to put around it including a turtle, crab, octopus, starfish, clam, seahorse and various shells, seaweed and coral. I was happy with the result but probably won’t attempt so many little elements again. The sand is just brown sugar that I fluffed up and separated with a fork.

This next cake ended up being a lot of icing but that didn’t stop everyone from eating it as it was the first time I ran out of cake for everyone. I made the airplane solely from icing and used marshmallows to prop the wings up so they didn’t break off. Then I used white Icing for the clouds under the plane and marshmallows cut in half to decorate around the bottom of the cake, which also hid my not so great cake icing skills.

 

For my mother in laws 50^th I offered to make a cake for her and because she loves trees and gardening I knew I had to incorporate that into a cake somehow. I bought the flowers from the supermarket but made the leaves from icing. I rolled the green and blue base icing together for the background and piped the tree using chocolate icing. This is one of my favourite cakes I’ve made, because although it was fairly simple I think it looked great when I was done.

 

Frogs have been something I’ve modelled from clay since I was in primary school. I learnt how to make them at a clay sculpting class one school holidays and have enjoyed making them since. So it was only natural that I would attempt to make one from icing. I will admit it was a bit of a nightmare, I used a Twix chocolate for the log and it and my frog kept wanting to slide off the cake so I slowly had to glue it back together each time with more icing. Also, as you can see my writing could use some work but despite this my Nan who loves frogs was in hospital for Mother’s day so my family and I surprised her with this cake!

The last cake is a rainbow butterfly that I made for my daughters first birthday. I made two separate cakes and cut out the shapes of the wings then covered the individual wings with white icing. I then rolled different coloured icing to outline the wings markings and filled them with coloured sprinkles. It was another relatively simple cake that turned out just how I’d imagined. 

I can’t say I enjoy making cakes enough to make them all of the time but I definitely enjoyed making these for some of the people I care about. It feels good to spend time making something that everyone enjoys and makes people smile.