Beer Mug Birthday Cake

First of all please let me apologize for the huge gap between posts, for awhile I have been thinking about writing a post letting you all know I was going to have a month off from blogging. Well I though about it, I procrastinated, I spent a bunch of time looking at living rooms on pinterest, and procrastinated some more. With all my time wasting almost a month has passed anyway, so now I am back and all my time pinning lead to me buying a gorgeous new sofa so it wasn't a total loss.

So this first cake isn't a beer mug cake, clearly. It is the skydive cake I made for my Dad's last Birthday, to go with the skydive we got him as his present. There's still some debate whether it is a nice or nasty gift. Turns out I may have got my habit of putting things off from my Dad, one year on he finally booked his dive. On his birthday he jumped out of a plane!!

That's my Dad way up there. In all the excitement I missed out on some shots of the landing but you get the idea.

Pretty sure after the thrill of jumping out of a plane from 14000 feet a person deserves/ needs a nice big beer or in my Dad's case a giant mug of beer cake. 

My ideas for a beer tasting themed party were replaced by the skydive, but the beer cake was still a huge hit.

I took cake pictures super early in the morning because we had to leave to get to the skydive office. The early photos didn't work out so well, but I did get these few after Dad cut the cake. The inside of the beer mug was 4 layers of chocolate mud cake filled and covered with dark chocolate ganache. To get a little more height for the foamy head of the beer I added a thick layer of vanilla buttercream and covered the whole cake with fondant.

Happy Birthday Dad!

I've had a number of people asking questions about how to make this cake so rather than emailing you all personally I thought I'd add a few notes:

• The shape of the handle was out of light grey fondant, I inserted a pop-stick into each end of the handle to help support the weight when inserted in the cake. The handle was made a few days before so it would dry hard.
• For the board, roll out brown fondant to cover the entire board. I used a ruler the back of a knife to score in the wood and grain and let the fondant dry out before painting it with a mix of brown food colour and vodka. The Vodka thins the colouring and evaporates faster than water to stop the fondant from getting too sticky.
• I cake itself was made from two 6 inch chocolate mud cakes, with each cake split in two to give me four layers. 
• The cake was covered and filled with dark chocolate ganache. 
• Because the cake was quite tall, I didn't cover the whole cake with fondant as I usually would. Instead I wrapped the beer coloured fondant around the outside of the cake and then smoothed the join. The white fondant beer head shape was cut separately then draped over the top. 
• To attach the handle to the cake I put 2 small cuts into the cake fondant where the pop sticks would go in so it wouldn't indent too much. I brushed a tiny bit of water on the parts of the handle that would sit against the cake and then pressed it in while the cake fondant was still soft.
• The lines of colour on the sides were painted on with food colouring thinned down with a tiny bit of vodka, a mix of brown and yellow. 

I hope this helps a little. Leave a comment if there are any other questions I can answer.

Dinosaur Birthday Cake

I loved dinosaurs when I was little! For my 5th birthday I got a tape player and a bunch of tapes (those things that came before cds that came before Ipods). My favourites by far came with set of dinosaur books. The tapes told dinosaur stories and sang dinosaur songs and I thought they were the raddest thing ever. 

My inner five year old was very happy to be asked to make a dinosaur cake for a little boys 2nd birthday over the weekend. As long as it was green I was able to do what ever I liked, so I picked my favourite dinosaur (although its actually a tie between stegosaurus and triceratops) and had fun.

I ended up choosing to make a stegosaurus inspired cake because the plates would look really cool made out of fondant. The cake was made out of my favourite vanilla cake and frosted with vanilla buttercream. Steggy and parts of the base board were covered in fondant with the finishing touch of grass piped was on with left over buttercream.

Happy Birthday Dash!