I had so much fun creating my son’s first birthday cake (How it all began…) that I felt I could do it again for birthday number two!  He loved playing with balls, and it seemed the perfect theme for his second birthday party.  And since I was new at making themed cakes, cutting out circles seemed the right level of challenge for my second cake!

I planned for bright primary colour balls to be cut out of rolled fondant, and also rolled up and “bouncing” from the top on wires.  I had seen wires used in other cakes, and I loved the visual impact it gave, without a lot of work!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I generally don’t like the main brand of fondant out there.  It has given fondant a reputation of tasting quite bad, but, it does hold up lovely in cool or warm weather, so it really is a good choice for wedding cakes that have to always look perfect!  But at weddings, this fondant is usually peeled of the slice of cake by the guests, as it really does not taste as good as it looks!  So Satin Ice, is currently my favourite fondant.  It tastes as good as it looks, and now they are coming in pre-coloured options!  At the time I purchased it from Bulkbarn.  But now Bulkbarn sells Virgin Ice Fondant.  I like this fondant to, it works just as well.  But Satin Ice Fondant can still be purchased online.

At the time though, (ten  years ago) they did not come pre-coloured.  Have you ever tried to colour fondant a bright red?  I have, using the small pots of colour, and it is not a fun experience.  I have since discovered Gel colour, and it is amazing stuff!  My favourite is by AmeriColor.  It’s the best Black Food Colouring on the market!  But I hadn’t discovered this when I started caking!  Though I had figured out that colouring fondant bright colours, especially red, took a lot of time, effort, and stained hands.  So I took the easy route, and purchased Wilton’s pre-coloured fondant; red, blue, and yellow.  I still used my favourite fondant, satin ice, for covering the cake though!

For the letters, I pre-made these using a flooding technique with royal icing.  I make my own royal icing using *this recipe*.  I’ll be uploading my flooding technique soon!

For the edging, I did not pipe, I used fondant.  I was planning on using balls for both the top and the bottom edging, but my letters were a little big!  So when I rolled the white fondant into a “snake” to line the base, and as it was white, it helped the letters look a lot more centered, and not over crowded.

And the circle cut outs… well… I *thought* that was the easy bit!  But my son’s birthday is in the summer, and I did not have air conditioning, and with the weather so hot and humid, the fondant stretched and slid down 🙁   So, definitely not a perfect final result that I was aiming for!  BUT… my son loved it, and I was learning to do by doing!  The best way to learn!

And I also made sugar cookies and decorated them with the royal icing flooding technique too!

But my favorite part of birthdays now, is when they blow out the candles on the cake I made with love!