Getting Cake Creative...

When I was a child, my Mum used to be renowned for making the most amazing, creative birthday cakes. This was due in part to her brilliant cake book: The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book, which my auntie must have sent over to her from Australia.

So as it was my nieces 4th birthday, and my nephews 1st birthday me and mum got creative to make them some pretty awesome birthday cakes. 

For my nephew, we settled on the classic number 1 shaped cake, covered in blue icing, and brightly coloured sweets (we settled on skittles in the end), and my nephew certainly seemed very happy with the result! 

Now for my niece as she's now 4, and knows what she wants, this was a lot more pressure to make a truly spectacular cake. We went for the swimming pool idea (featured in this cookbook with green jelly as the water), as she likes swimming, and you can use chocolate fingers all around the edge which are also a favourite of hers. 

Sadly, Waitrose let us down by not having any green or blue jelly, or anything similar we thought we could use. So with our basket laden full of skittles, chocolate fingers, jelly sweets for rings, and then the rest of the party food, we came up with the genius idea of whipped cream. Who doesn't love cream on a cake, and whipping it would make great waves to make it look like water. The only questions was how well would the food colouring take to it? Having never dyed cream before I was slightly worried, but thankfully adding a bit of blue and green colouring worked perfectly and the cake looked AMAZING!!

So here are the final pictures, it was not only a lot of fun but my niece and nephew were very very happy and so it was a very successful mission!