Figures and 1st birthdays...

So 1st Birthday cakes often present a challenge. You generally have to feed a crap load of people but you also want something that the new toddler can smash and smush. As you can see in this photo... the cake is built in tiers and the top most one is actually only slightly larger than a cupcake.


Figures can be great cake toppers. This monkey is fairly simple to make (mostly just circles and rods). The internet can be very useful to find ideas. This one is a conglomeration of several different monkeys that I found online.

Truffles!

Truffles are soo much fun to make! Plus they're a tasty way to use up left over ganache, other than just licking the bowl!


Basically its the same ganache recipe as an earlier post. Then I used powdered chocolate in a small bowl. I used a melon baller to make them approximately the same size. Then rolled them in the powdered chocolate. The melon baller on its own worked really well when the ganache was cold (from being in the fridge) but they started to stick as the metal melon baller and the ganache warmed.

I wonder how they'd look on a cake?

And then there was cake...

So Jess's cake didn't turn out nearly as cool as I'd hope but he was thrilled with it (good husband!)... The squig was impossible to shrink (with my skills). I haven't figure out a good medium for sculpting yet. Fondant is too soft. Modeling chocolate is too sticky. The x-wing presented similar problems. SO... the computer chips multiplied and became the side decorations. After spending hours trying to get the darn x-wing to work I finally gave up at 11:30 last night. I went to McD's for Jess's birthday lunch and got an x-wing in the happy meal!

As promised here are the photos

The desktop with a dos prompt (but the backslashes are backwards... ooops... but my wonderful hubby didn't point it out)


Here's the finished cake...

Close up on the computer chip thing

Next up... monkeys and princesses

The next project begins...

With Jess's birthday right around the corner (March 13) I will be starting the next cake project. He prefers butter cream icing to fondant so if anyone has any tips for making butter cream icing look smooth (finished) please feel free to pass them along. If I come up with anything I'll pass it along.

For now though I'm just working on the toppers. He's got a thing for computers (go figure) and so I'll be making a bunch of fondant and royal icing computer chips. I'm also going to make a scale model of a computer (desktop).

We watch the cake shows too (Cake Boss, Ultimate Cakeoff and Ace of Cakes) and on one of them they made a Squig (a video game alien monster thing) so I'll be trying to make a small version of that as well to top the cake.

I'll add pictures as I finish the toppers...

Ganache

So I realized that I posted a photo of my Ganache but didn't tell you how I made it. It's a simple thing really. Just make sure that if you're going to use it for a cake filling you have about 6 hours for it to chill. You can also make it like a week in advance too if you want.

8 oz chocolate morsels (pick a kind that you'd eat plain by the handful)
2 T butter
3/4 C heavy whipping cream

Put the chocolate in a metal bowl. Melt the butter in a sauce pan and then mix in the cream and bring to just boiling. Pour over the chocolate and let it stand 5 minutes. Whisk until it becomes shiny. then cover and refrigerate.

I triple the recipe for a 3 layer 6 inch cake with a 3 layer 8 inch cake topsy turvy cake.

and the verdict is...

Here's the chalkboard placard that announces a sweet girls birthday. She loves to read so I've included a bookworm as well.

And the entire thing...