Danny's 4th Birthday

This weekend is a real anniversary for me, because not only is it my son Danny's 4th birthday, but it was Googling cake ideas for his birthday last year, and thinking, "I could do that!" that gave me the inspiration for my little business.

For months now Danny's been telling me that he wanted Spiderman and Cookie Monster cakes, but at the last minute he also added Elmo to the mix. Good because I wanted to work a bit more on my Elmo design- his mouth is different to Cookie Monster's, and this time I put some white icing on the cake first, so that his rugby ball-shaped head is more obvious.

I also baked some of Nigella Lawson's Butter Cut-Out Biscuits (from her Domestic Goddess book), and Danny and I iced them so that he could take them into school and share them with his nursery friends.

Chocolate Guinness cakes with vanilla or chocolate buttercream and fondant decorations






Blowing out the candles.


Look out, it's SpiderDan!


Ruby chose Cookie Monster and got a bright blue mouth!


Icing the number 4-shaped biscuits for Danny to take to nursery.


You can probably tell which he did and which I did.


Unbelievably, Danny is 4!

Snowmen and Snowflakes and Fairs, oh my!

The mini cakes packaged and ready to go to school:
Hmmm, not too happy with how they look, I wish I'd just done plain white buttercream in the end, as the pink looks odd and a bit clown-like.
I was trying to be too clever and Christmassy: it's cranberry flavour.


All the biscuits baked and iced/decorated for the fair.


Some are decorated with lebkuchen-style almonds. The sugar 'glaze' is mixed with edible gold lustre: you can see it in real life, but I couldn't make it show on the photos.


Lebkuchen-esque angel


Baubles.


My favourite one.


All boxed up and ready to be transported (by sledge: how authentic!) to the school.


It's snowing outside, so I'm indoors making tiny cake toppers for this Saturday's school fair.
50 snowmen are smiling up at me and I'm thinking about some sort of cranberry buttercream to make them extra Christmassy.
Tomorrow's job is to ice the gingerbread tree decorations that I baked yesterday.