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...