Sweet Sixteen

K turns Sixteen

K turns three. Where does the time go?



Making birthday cakes, for me, has been a little like motherhood. It's been a learning experience. I started out when they were little just writing their names on their cakes (fortunately for a while that's what I did at my job, while still pregnant with K). K's first cake was a free cake from the grocery store where I lived. It had a clown face on it. I can't believe how fast the time has flown. This seems to be a favorite topic of mine now days. By the time she turned six years old they had begun making those cans of frosting and I took advantage of that and piped her out a unicorn on a piece of waxed paper, filled it in with a can of white frosting and then took a hot knife and smoothed it out and then froze it and then put it on her cake. I started to get the hang of the bday cake thing. I made Matt a big baseball cake once, on a field of green. That was when he turned five. I made Ally a two tiered lemon cake with pink icing for her seventh bday. Last year K told me she wanted a cherry cheesecake for her bday and I decided to experiment and do a two layered cheesecake. Let me just say that now I know why they don't make two tiered cheesecakes. The whole thing started falling apart as soon as we got to the table and with the cherries on top mixing with the falling cheesecake as we tried to cut it, it began to resemble a scene from Hannibal Lechter. There was a lot of laughter about it and it tasted good but as far as cakes go it was a disaster. This year I decided to do something a little different. I decided for her sixteenth bday I would make a fondant covered cake. I have never tried it but it looks easy on "Ace of Cakes" on the Food Network. Of course nothing is ever as easy as it looks. I brought the box home and liked the bow on the cake on the picture on the box and that's what I decided to do. It came out of the box looking like white modeling clay and it felt like clay. It was very tough to knead. It was like really tough pie dough. I kneaded it for a minute and then realized I had forgotten the coloring. I couldn't do a white bow on top of a white cake so I went to the store with my remaining ten dollars and realized that I would have to buy a whole box, since Wal Mart doesn't sell the individual colors anymore. I really only needed the pink and green, but oh, well, you only turn sixteen once, so I bought it. I got home and opened the green and kneaded it in. It looked great. I don't know how it happened, but somehow, while I wasn't looking, Sam got ahold of the food coloring. I was really into kneading this stuff and rolling it out like pie dough, like the instructions said, when I heard this funny crunching sound. I knew Sam didn't have anything he should be crunching on, so I looked around the corner and there was my dog with the green food coloring in his mouth having a green feast. I'm ashamed to say I lost my temper.
I retrieved the container and threw away his blanket. Somehow miraculously he didn't have a drop of green on him or on the floor. I got back to my cake.
After I rolled it out and laid it on the cake I realized I needed something to cover the bottom of the cake which wasn't perfect. I cut a strip of rolled fondant and then decided it needed a pattern. I looked around for something to make an imprint with and spotted my "salt", a little turquoise blue glass container that would have held salt on a table in the early twentieth century, and rolled it along the strip. It looked great. All in all I was encouraged by how well this project was going. Then I began to cut the strips for the bow. Only the fondant was not dry so it was limp. It didn't look like a fluffy bow. I decided I needed to stuff the loops with something to hold them up til it dried. I ended up using my icing tips to stuff the loops with. After they were dry I carefully pried them out, careful not to dislodge the bow.
I added some little pink butter cream flowers with help from my youngest. She always likes to help me bake. Then I put it in the fridge. Even I am amazed at how well this project turned out. I'm already thinking ahead to the next bday. The possibilities are endless.