Sophie the Giraffe cake

Our baby turned one this week! We gave her some books, car window stickers and winter accessories. She loved unpacking them and somehow understood that the wrapping was just that, wrapping. Not the gift. Maybe our wrapping paper wasn't pretty enough...
We are celebrating her birthday this weekend so I had no issues with making a birthday cake for another little girl who turned one at almost exactly the same time as our baby girl. I know her mommy from lamaze class and it wasn't until the follow up course that we found out she had been next door on the delivery ward! We had both come in for pain killers. After 16 hours I'd had enough.... so with a nice little pump on my arm which didn't help with the pain at all but did make me relax a little, my delivery finally went into hyper drive. So did the rest of my life, how this year has flown by!

Anyhoo, the order was for a Sophie the Giraffe puzzle cake. So once again I used my trusty method of finding a picture online and tracing it off my computer screen onto thick paper. I decided to make Sophie out of off-white fondant. I used cake tools and my fingers with the pic on my computer as reference to make her look a little 3D and then painted her brown spots on. It worked really well, better than I expected. I just have an issue with her eyes, which could have been better. They just don't say friendly/ happy to me, but black spots...

I also made a ribbon on the side of the cake with the same spots and a little bow for extra detail. The rest of the decoration is made out of marzipan and the inside is chocolate mud cake with a lemon butter cream, yummy!
I did notice that the number 1 is really unrecognizable on a cake. It might have been better to say 1 year old but that didn't fit anymore. Next time I'll have to find a more suitable 1.

Now I get to make my own baby's cake! I'm quite excited because it's going to be something really different. I don't want it to have too much decoration on it because I don't want her eating that so I've decided to leave it plain and add Winnie the Pooh and Piglet silhouette figures. Next week I'll show the result of that.

The budget wedding cake

My last post might have given off the impression that I thought the bride and groom were seriously underpaying for their cake. This was not my intention and while there were some parts where I was doing work I wasn't being paid for (like getting all the cakes the same size) overall the cake and the time I spend on it reflects the budget. So I was happy with that!

Now I'm on to the birthday of my baby girl which is super fun!

As she is turning the very young age of just 1, I don't want to give her a really sweet, packed full of evil food coloring, cake. After a quick and fruitful search on google (baby first birthday cake recipe were my search words) I came across a wonderful site full of lovely baby cake recipes.

My eye immediately fell on the honey and ginger cake which sounds and looks yummy. I'm really excited to make it and have decided to use it for my mom's cake pop order which is for Friday.

So here is the recipe if you're interested:
No it's not, I checked out the disclaimer and they might not be happy if I print the recipe here but you can check it out on their website: Homemade baby food recipes. 

I´m going to make Disney´s Fab 5 cake pops with it. I haven´t quite decided on how to stick the cake together to form the balls, I´m thinking cream cheese or maybe melted chocolate, or ganache... not sure. I have a bunch of ganache in the freezer so that would be a good choice. It might taste weird together though. I´ll have to try.

Anyway here is my Fab 5 cake pop idea:

I'm hoping it will be pretty easy. I want to make them as a birthday treat for when we go on our family reunion weekend next week. The idea looks cute...