My First Cake in Over Six Months

So, as you can tell from my last post, we moved. We have unpacked, and we are homeowners. Before moving, we went on an Alaskan cruise, and I was out of town for a month long workshop and then went to Vietnam. (I need to blog about Alaska and Vietnam. They were wonderful trips.) All of that caused me to go about six months without making a cake! Me...the R2D2 decorator....hadn't decorated a cake in six months! With the house, I hadn't had time. Boxes had to be unpacked, new jobs positions, and visitors as well as leaving town caused bonding time for me and Evengeline the Tangerine the kitchen aid to be limited.

Well, lucky for me, I have very talented family members, and my aunt is a whiz at sewing. Her housewarming/ Christmas/ birthday presents to us was to come for a few days and make curtains. My mother was to be her sewing servant for those few days. I came home over the next few days to a flurry of string and fabric scraps as gorgeous curtains emerged from sewing machines. Before they came and before the kitchen table became sewing central, I made a cake for my aunt, because her visit coincided with her birthday.

I had elaborate plans of making a cake with white chocolate sea shells and light blue icing, but time got the best of me. Instead I used the left over fondant I had colored for a Christmas cake. (A cake that did not have a picture taken of it, so it does not get a blog post....it is sufficient enough to say it was a cute and tasty Christmas cake.) I used circle cookie cutters to make two different sized circles. Then I used a toothpick to punch holes in the circles. The small circles got two holes and the big circles got four. On the bigger circles I pressed a shot glass down on them to give them a little lip that made them look more "button-ish." See...

I cheated and used a small tube of gel icing to "stitch" the words happy birthday onto the cake. The last step was to make a needle out of gray fondant; the gray had originally been used for ornament tops. It was fun to see colors that I associated with Christmas (red= ornament, green= tree, yellow= start) transform into a bright, completely non-Christmas birthday cake. I will brag on myself and say I really like how I used some of the smaller buttons as parts of the lettering for Happy Birthday.

 

I think by stitching the buttons onto the top of the cake really sold the circles as buttons and not circles with random holes. 

 

  

My aunt loved it and thought it tasted really good as well. (I used just a basic yellow cake recipe and added some almond extract.) I won't lie; the cake barely lasted through the three day visit!  And the curtains came out wonderfully; I like to think that the sugar rush from the cake helped increase productivity.