What a year it’s been! To celebrate my daughter, Scarlett, turning a whole one year old, I thought I might make a cake for her birthday tea party. Fine. Then I started looking to Pinterest for a little inspiration. This is where it all blew up, because there are some AWESOME cakes out there! Up to now, my nephew’s Spiderman cake of ’12 was by far the best cake I’d made, and I really, really did not know what I was doing. Yeah, I can bake a cake, but I really have little clue when it comes to icing and decorating.
I drew out the little doodle above after all of my Pinterest madness. My bird actually ended up looking pretty much exactly like this! Yes, it looks a bit like a duck. As well as all the amazing cakes, I was inspired by the polka dot birds hanging in her room.
Luckily for me, I have a bona fide cake expert in my friend Lenka, who creates beautiful and yummy delights (check out her facebook page!) – she made Scarlett’s Christening cake. She repeatedly set me on the right track.
A week before Scarlett’s birthday, Lenka dropped into conversation that I needed to be making the decorations for the cake so that they’d dry in time. Cue panic stations! To combat said panic, Lenka provided me with:
- 2 x 12″ cake tins
- 2 sets of letters to spell out Scarlett
- The number 1
- The top of a piping bag to stamp out polka dots
- A cake smoother. I’ll get to this, it’s BRILLIANT!
So, if Lenka hadn’t been involved, I would have pretty much had a plain cake, with whatever Tesco’s Dr Oetker display had to offer thrown at it.
A week before the big day, I baked four cakes. Yes, you read that right. I had a dream of a graduating pink creation. We’ll brush straight past that one, because it didn’t work. I didn’t put enough food colouring in. I then stacked the cakes in colour order (I was still crossing my fingers at that point) and froze them. With Barry’s family coming to stay, I thought I wouldn’t have time to bake, ice, and decorate a cake as well as clean, etc.
The following day, I started making the decorations in two shades of pink. Here are the polka dots, along with birds, letters, numbers and I iced the cake board for good measure.
For the birds, I drew around the ones in her room onto greaseproof paper and cut them out to draw around. I made so many decorations because I thought some may crack and break, which they did. I do wish I’d had a bit more patience with the letter R, because it was very stubborn and ended up looking, erm, full of character. My friend Jemima said I’m not allowed to say it was crap.
I then waited a week to put it all together, but I won’t make you wait that long…
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