Part 2 : The Birthday Cake

I've finally completed my daughter's birthday cake! Didn't turn out the way i designed it though.. It was hard work and plus i didn't decorate it very well, ie, my 'workmanship' was rather untidy imo. What is supposedly 3-tier ended up looking like one very tall tier..LOL! I didn't cut each level cake to the right size i guess. :P Everything is edible (except the candles & ribbons) and the fondant is homemade MMF. I made the MMF using the mixer last night - which is definitely much easier than hand-kneading and less-messier too! Surprisingly the red and the black turned out quite dark quite unlike the icing on my cookies. I didn't add that much coloring either. The cake doesn't look very 'Venetian' either..:(...actually i think it looks more like the some flag?!!? hahahahaha... Oh well, my first time doing a 3-tier cake..so lesson well learnt..






i like this pic..the cake on the table with photos of my 'baby' at different age..:)



the BIRTHDAY CAKE : 1st tier: Chocolate cake with peanut buttercream frosting. 2nd tier: Vanilla cake with lemon buttercream frosting. 3rd tier: Vanilla cake with strawberry buttercream frosting. All covered with homemade MMF.

Part I - Birthday Venetian Theme

My daughter's 18th birthday is coming and she wants to have a 'Venetian Theme' for her birthday cake. I've designed her cake but too shy to post it up yet..hahahaha..until the end product, ie, the final cake turns out well like my drawing, then i will post it together with the cake...:D

I made these batch of decorated cookies in the shape of mask and fan...cos that's only what i can think of...hahaha..and that's all i saw selling at the shops in Venice when we were there! LOL! So, these mask & fan cookies will be part of the cake. Oh..as for the stars and hearts, i got tired of having to cut the cookies to mask & fan manually (yup..without any cookie cutters), that i took out the star & heart cookie cutters and cut the rest of the dough into the respective shapes!

Decorating cookies is hard work! Just decorating these few cookies took me like 4 hours to decorate and that doesn't include the baking of the cookies or even cutting the cookies into shape etc?! Tiring.. And again, my piping skills sucks! This is my first time doing decorated cookies..so i didn't even know it would be SOOOOOO tedious!

Here are the various photos of the decorated masks...







Here are the fans, stars and hearts..





You can see from the photos that some i didn't pipe well and evenly cos i was getting very tired...and it was like 11+pm and i was still piping....:(

And my daughter piped most of these (see photo below)...esp. the creative ones she did it..not bad i would say! She did the basic template of the mask & fan for me as a guide to manually cut out the cookies. :)