Birthday Fun

Ahhhh, I can relax now that the Birthday festivities are over! I successfully made a cake, although I was not satisfied with the result.  You see, it took a lot longer than anticipated to put the whole thing together.  I made the fondant friday night and refrigerated it overnight.  I now wish that I had colored it prior to refrigerating it so that the coloring was complete prior to Saturday morning.  I got up early Saturday morning and made the cakes.  I was pleased with my marble cakes.  I was not pleased with the size and shape of the cake pans that I purchased but they worked very well.   I made up a little cake release and brushed it in the pans prior to putting the batter in and the popped right out when they were done.  Excellent results!  The chocolate buttercream frosting was delish!  Super sweet.  It reminded me of the chocolate filling that you might find inside of a donut.  So putting the cake layers together and frosting it with the buttercream frosting was easy and came together nicely.


I then colored the fondant.  I found that you need to work with the fondant for a few minutes because it is hard from being in the refrigerator.  A great hand workout.  Not my favorite part.  Coloring the fondant was fun.  I read that you should use food safe gloves when coloring the fondant, however I didn't want to buy a huge pack of gloves when I was only making one cake.  So I opted to chance having colored hands.  I made the red fondant first.  I was really scared when I saw how red my hands became, however I quickly washed my hands when finished and the coloring pretty much washed off.   I was so pleased that I was able to get the colors to be what I wanted.  Black and red are not too difficult, but tan is not easy.  I did it though, and was proud to have accomplished it with yellow, red and black! Once I colored all the fondant, I rolled out the base for the cake.  I rolled it on a silicone mat that I have for rolling pie dough.  It stuck.  So my ingenious husband suggested I roll it on plastic wrap.  This worked well, but left marks in the fondant that needed to be smoothed.  I was able to successfully transfer the fondant to the cake and smooth it, but it was not holding shape as well as I had hoped.  I think it was a little too warm or worked a little too much because I had to roll it out twice.  But it was on the cake.  I chose not to take the time to mess with it too much.

By this time it was past noon and I had wanted to be finished by noon so I rushed making the monkey.  I was disappointed with my results.  The proportions were all wrong and I didn't take care to clean my surface after each step so some colored specs ended up being in the tan part of the face. If I had wanted to take more time, I would have worked with it until it was perfect - and had I been expecting guests I certainly would have taken the time - but I just wanted to get on with the partying, so I put my imperfect monkey on the cake and called it quits.  I put little red fondant balls around the base of the cake and placed it on the table.  I was over the baking, so I simply placed the red balls around my sons little cake and put some little red sugar sprinkles on top with the candle.  It worked.

The cake was only one part of the party right?  We had a great time!  We opened presents, played with the toys received and ate the cake after having pizza.  Then we played with dough, finger painted and played with stickers.  It was a great day.  Lots of fun!  I was so exhausted by the end of the day though.  That glass of wine at the end of the night when I finally sat down was so delightful (and much deserved).  Even my husband was praising me for my hard work and that's saying something!