It’s our spring Birthday season again, with three of us
having our Birthdays in close succession, and a few more Birthdays among our
extended family and friends. We do like Birthdays! And baking cakes! And eating them, of
course… I admit that we regularly suspend any healthy eating
attempts by starting each Birthday with a breakfast that basically consists of
a massive slice of Birthday cake (orange juice and/or hot chocolate with cream
and marshmallows are optional extras!)
Celebrating all these Birthdays, I am getting rather sentimental
over how the time passes, and how quickly children grow bigger, turn into
teenagers, grow up etc, so I delved into our old photographs and had a good
look through them. Whilst reliving many
memories and getting a bit emotional, I also found all these pictures of
Birthday cakes, that I have made over the past years...
This is my first ever child’s Birthday cake which I made for
Martin for his first Birthday. (Sorry about the picture quality – we didn’t
have a very good camera back then. I
scanned the prints, and gave them a bit of a makeover, so hopefully you won’t mind
too much.)
The main component was a homemade cake – I can’t
remember which recipe I used (I presume it was one of my usual suspects –
probably a chocolate cake). What I remember is that I also had some shop bought
cake, which I cut in various shapes, out of
which I built up the landscape.
The whole cake was covered in ready-to-roll icing which I
had dyed green beforehand –I have a vague memory of messing around with liquid
green food colouring, and have learned in the meantime that using food
colouring paste would have been a lot easier…
I added a few more details using sugar paste and food
colouring – a lake, some houses, a tunnel entrance, flowers etc. and then piped
on the railway track.
The train candle holders have become family treasure by now.
They come from a local supermarket and have been in use quite a few times over
the years (we also have a second set to make up bigger numbers!)
P.S.: I hope you are not too disappointed, but I won’t be showing you professionally decorated cakes here in my blog – (they can always be ordered and bought from professional cake shops 😉). Also, I’m completely aware that there are many of you who are a lot better at cake decorating than I am.
However, I’m showing you our cakes because they were fun to
make and because they reflect what our children were interested in at the time.
Some of them were a surprise, and some of them we made together. And I hope to
encourage you and your family (in case you haven't already) to build your very own 'Birthday cake family
history'…
