I’ve been a little busy with kids’ birthdays recently!
This sixth birthday cake is surprisingly easy to assemble and looks great. I came up with the idea by doing a quick Google image search – loads of people have made a version of this cake for various age numbers.
It was my elder son’s 5th birthday recently. It’s taken me a while to blog about this cake, but if you follow my posts you’ll probably already know I gave birth to our second son at around the time of my first son’s birthday and since then I’ve been a tad busy!
As I knew my sons’ birthdays would be very close together, I wanted to make a birthday cake which was simple and quick to assemble. Some internet browsing brought me to this building site / digger cake idea in the form of some photos. I did my best to copy what I saw, using my own cake recipe and various toy construction site pieces I already had.
This cake came about because I treated myself to four shallow round cake tins… which of course meant I had to make a four-layer cake. That said, you could still follow this recipe using 2, “ordinary” depth (about an inch/2.5 cm) round cake tins and then cut your cakes in half. Here’s a photo of an “ordinary” depth tin (on the left) and one of the shallow tins (on the right):
To make the cakes, I used my usual go-to sponge recipe. It’s the only one I can remember without having to look at a book! I found the caramel buttercream frosting recipe over at Instructables, although when I make it again I’ll add icing sugar for the filling and crumb coat as well, not just the final coat (that will make sense when you get to the decoration section of the method!).
Ingredients
It was my son’s birthday recently and I spent quite a while wondering what cake to make him. Last year I spent hours make a cake in the shape of a car. Like this:
This year I decided to go for a time-saving option. Instead of trying to make some sort of cake sculpture, I searched for a nice cupcake stand and made simple cupcakes to fill it. My son loves rockets and an internet search turned up this set which includes the cupcake stand, 24 rocket cupcake cake toppers and 24 starry cupcake cases.
Putting the stand together is easy. The rigid cardboard pieces just slot together and the finished effect is great.
Now onto the bit where I made cake! This is a basic sponge recipe (which will probably be familiar to many of you) with some milk chocolate chips thrown into the mix.
Ingredients (these amounts will make 12 cupcakes. I doubled up this mix to make 24)
A delicious loaf cake with a moist raspberry centre.
Yet another recipe from my Mum’s folder of clippings from various magazines. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the cutting to say which magazine this came from – sorry! I made a couple of changes to the given method and was pleased with the results 🙂
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I’ve been wanting to try this one for a long, long time, ever since I saw them online last year when searching for ideas for my son’s birthday cake. I got the recipe from BBC Good Food (ever reliable!).
I used flat-bottomed ice cream cones, but I have seen other recipes which use pointy-end cones (technical term there)… but they’re a bit trickier to make and I’m all about convenience 🙂
I chose a vanilla cake recipe, but there’s nothing to stop you filling your cones with a different flavoured cake mix.
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I got this recipe from my trusty book: Sweet and Savoury bites by Jane Price.
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This recipe is from my recipe book. Which obviously means I got it from my mum at some point!
Ingredients (makes 8 very generous slices!)
Continue reading for the recipe and more lovely pics!
This torta stracciatella (aka chocolate chip cake) is a delicious blend of light sponge and dark chocolate.
I found the original recipe for this choc chip cake at My Little Italian Kitchen. But the original recipe was for a large circular tin and I wanted to use my loaf tin… so I decided to reduce all the original quantities by a third. As you’ll see below, this means some of my amounts are a bit odd, but it works!
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A giant glazed doughnut (donut if you prefer!) cake with sugar sprinkles. Surprisingly easy to make and a fun cake for any party.
I honestly can’t remember where or when I first saw one of these. But I do remember thinking, “What a great idea!” If you think I might have seen this on your blog, please let me know so I can thank you.
I used my usual, simple sponge cake recipe. The most difficult bit might be finding the appropriately-shaped cake tin 🙂
Wait! There’s more. Click for the recipe and more lovely pics!
Art and Soul 