Pony Love

Our daughter has been mad about horses since she was 4, after watching Black Beauty (the original black and white version). So her next four birthday cakes were equine-themed.

Year 4 brought the Carousel Cake. It was the first big cake I made (birthday parties in our house are huge affairs). It did look too wedding-like, but all she cared for was the ponies, so it passed muster.

This was the Spirit and Rain cake - if you have not watched it yet, 'tis a lovely animated movie about wild mustangs. Nice soundtrack by Bryan Adams, who was quite the hottie way back. Yes, I am THAT old. The sun in the corner was a gluten free cake for our dear friend Jean.

Ponies in a meadow - kindergarten birthday year. The chocolate ponies were from Cost Plus - they get them around Christmas time. They're actually rocking horse-shaped - I used a hot knife to cut out the rocker and fashion legs for the fellows. It's yummy high-quality chocolate, which was a bit of a waste on the kids who just gobbled them up. Rekha insisted that each pony have different markings to match the different horses at the stable where she was taking riding lessons. Again, the wonders of candy options in this country never cease to amaze me - you can buy different colored melt-able candy in tubes to decorate chocolate, and it dries hard so it does not get messy. And you just paint it on, directly from the tubes. Brilliant!
These Pony Cupcakes were fun to make - again a borrowed idea from some website or magazine. Cannot recall the source (I'm old enough to have listened to Bryan Adams, remember?). Again, the array of candies available at Walgreens was instrumental, as in Circus Peanuts for the horse heads, wafers for the necks, and pretzels for the tails. The Circus Peanuts only came in orange, so the horses looked a little jaundiced, but regardless, the kids were tickled pink when they saw them and that's all that matters.

Lesson learned from the Pony Cupcakes - cupcakes are way too labor intensive and take much more time to complete than a regular cake because each one has to be crafted individually. I really want to know how the gourmet cupcake places get the frosting on so smooth and high. Maybe I'll take cake decor classes when I retire...

Pool Party Cake

Have I mentioned how much I LOVE the endless possibilities that American candies offer for cake decor? This Pool Party cake is a good example....
My favorite part was making the pool slide out of an ice cream cone, pretzel sticks and a fruit roll up. Full disclosure - not my ideas, but borrowed from something I saw in some foodie magazine somewhere.

And there's little Teaser Teddy in her hot orange 2-piece, waiting to take the plunge...

The Teddy Grahams were too cute not to dress up in swimsuits. Doughnut-shaped sour candy thingies became the life-preservers. Jolly Ranchers split in half were dandy little poolside-loungers. It was fun making the ladder out of pretzel sticks glued together with marshmallows.I wish I could have found just blue and white "Chiclets", but my only local resource was the El Rancho market and all they had were the multi-colored packs. Ah well. This was before my discovery of fondant, so colorful pool tiles they were.

Martini Lover's Cake

Most of my cakes are made for kids, but ever so often, I get a request for something for an adult. This cake was made for a neighbor's friend who was turning 50, so I aimed for something a little more elegant.Working with gum paste was new to me, so creating the martini glass was a learning experience. I used a funnel for the shape, but next time, I will shape the gum paste on the inside of an actual martini glass as it results in a smoother finish. And now that I realize that I can join gum paste together easily, I will make the stem separately and mush the two pieces together. The red stripes and edging were a fruit roll up (I LOVE the endless possibilities that American candy provides!!) A chopstick runs down the middle of the martini glass into the cake for stability. Our friends Sasha & Lenny, and my dear spousal unit provided much needed creative direction along the way - thanks guys!

My dear spousal unit also suggested pouring vodka into the glass and setting it aflame for the birthday girl....which would have been fabulous if I were more certain that the vodka would not simply dissolve the gum paste martini glass! Instead, we suggested that the birthday gal squirt whipped cream into the cup before lighting the candle.

The verdict on gum paste - it has interesting possibilities for shaping stuff, but it just tastes so darned awful...bleah! (I did try making it out of rice-krispie treats, which would have worked if I had more time to experiment - and would have been so much yummier. Next time.)

Princesses!

My daughter loves horses and all things Star Wars. She may never ever want a girly princess cake. So, to satisfy my inner princess, I have offered to make girly cakes for my friends' daughters, and here are a few of them...Baseball Barbie was for Shannon, our friend who loves baseball and all things pink. Her mom has a photo of her in a pink princess nightdress, playing baseball with her many brothers, which inspired this cake.Twenty little fairy cupcakes were made for another little girl's party - there were great ideas on the web, and after borrowing some images from butterfly cupcakes and princess designs....I came up with this. My cousin Ann Marie asked how these were to be eaten, and I must confess that how to cut and eat all these cakes are a whole different story! At this fairy princess party, I think the kids just ate the fairy heads and left the rest for their parents!!


The green princess shows my first attempt at sugared flowers - a surprisingly easy process. A little meringue powder plus sugar, and voila - sugared violas! The kids had fun eating them, and the flowers kept their color really well. They store well in the fridge, so I'd recommend making a bunch at a time. They're cute on frosted sugar cookies, as well.
I decorated a princess cake while on vacation in Malaysia, minus all my cake decor tools, but with a great team of decorators, which included my mom who baked her fabulous butter cake in a deep Pyrex bowl, my older brother Suresh who was strangely driven to shape the Barbie skirt to perfection, cousin Ann Marie who smoothed out the pink frosting until it looked like silk, and niece Raena who did Barbie's hair with deft fingers and an earring from the 70s. Teamwork!

Casita Cake

This cake was my second attempt at cake decor. It was made for Fernanda, my wonderful friend Maria's daughter. I'm a firm believer in the adage that "it takes a village to raise a kid", and Maria was one of the mom's in our daughter's network of "other mommies" as Maria cared for Rekha from the time she was 5 months old until she was 4.
Maria cared for two other little girls at the time, along with her two. This cake was christened "Casita de los Ninos", with the cookie people representing each of the kids she took care of.