Lollipop cake

I made this cake for my niece Allyson's 9th birthday. It looks pretty okay here, but after transporting it to my Dad's house where the party was held, it started melting in the crazily hot and humid weather!

The fondant went all wet and soft and started sliding down the sides! It was awful. I had no choice but to pop it into the refrigerator and took it out just minutes before it was time to cut it. Once you put a fondant cake into the fridge, it's destroyed, because when you take it out, the sudden temperature change will cause condensation on the fondant surface. The fondant will then absorb this moisture and turn into gunk!

So anyway, luckily it was still reasonably presentable when it was candle-blowing time.


The lollies are not real lollies. I made them from gumpaste a few days ahead. I just twisted ropes of coloured gumpaste with ropes of white gumpaste and rolled the rope up into spirals. Then I stuck in disposable chopsticks. These were left to harden for a few days.


The cake was a plain madeira cake with custard filling. I think that was another mistake, to have a water based filling like custard instead of an oil based one like butter cream. The fondant must have also absorbed the water from the custard. Thus, the resulting gloppy glue.

The birthday girl is one of those rare kids who is not fond of chocolate!! That's why I came up with the madeira cake with custard filling. I think I'll just stick to good ol' chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream in the future!

Annie's 9th Birthday

Thursday was my eldest daughter Annie's birthday. She has always wanted to help me in decorating cakes, but I never allowed her to. So, I promised that she could decorated her own birthday cake when the time came.


I made a simple, plain, two-tiered cake. It was chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling. The top tier I covered in pale green fondant and the bottom tier was light pink. Then, I made a border of white gumpaste daisies.


Annie decided to add a few gumpaste butterflies which I had made earlier. Then she piped her name and some patterns using a tube of blue sparkling gel icing.


I do believe she enjoys cake decorating as much as her Mummy! :)

Pika... Pika... Pikachu!

My nephew Timothy celebrated his 11th birthday yesterday. He has a huge collection of Pokemon cards, so I thought he would appreciate a Pokemon cake!


I chose to make Pikachu, because he is the most well-loved one and more importantly because he is blob-shaped!! Hehehe, that meant he would be easy to make!


I didn't have a very good experience using Rice Krispies to make models, so this time I tried using cake instead. I find that cake is much easier to work with, and the only disadvantage would be it's weight. Therefore I made sure to use lots of support in the bottom base cake, lest the whole thing caved in!

The inside of Pikachu is carrot cake which I bought because I was too lazy to make so much cake! I first made a cylindrical shape by layering small circles of cake and then gradually carved out a rough shape of Pikachu. I then covered him in yellow fondant and used tinted fondant to make his facial features and stripes.

His appendages, i.e: tail, ears and limbs, were all made from gumpaste ahead of time. They were left to dry and harden for a couple of days. I stuck them on with the help of toothpicks. I had trouble with the tail which was heavy and sticking out at an angle. In the end, I resorted to using an external bamboo skewer. It didn't look too good, but at least Pikachu had a tail!


The tips of his ears I painted black, using food colouring diluted with a bit of alcohol based vanilla essence. The bottom of his tail was painted the same way, with brown. The base cake, I covered with red and white, which is the colour of the ball thingie from which these cute monsters emerge!

The base cake was banana cake which I did bake, and frost with bittersweet chocolate buttercream. It wasn't very popular with the kids, so I suppose I'll just stick to boring old chocolate cake next time.