Birthday Cake

Last weekend my friends and I who live in Liverpool visited our friend Laura who is living in Rugby, as a surprise for her birthday. We managed to keep the whole thing a secret for over a month with the help of her husband Chris. Laura is always travelling up to Liverpool for our birthdays (well except mine :p lol) and our Christmas meals so we thought it was about time we organised ourselves to go and visit her instead.
Hannah and Andy went up the night before and stayed with Hannah's nan in Leicester and Becky made her way to Leicester also, from Bath the night before.

Me, Becca and Carol congregated at Sian's house and left in Sian's car at 8:30am so we could get there for about 11am. After a slight detour we eventually arrived and sprung on Laura and showered her with presents galore! And then headed into Leicester to meet the others

I had taken the previous day off work to bake a birthday cake and some marshmallow cupcakes. I had wanted to make a birthday cake that looked like ones you could buy in a shop and also use my new decorating skills (well skills is a bit of a strong word lol). So I baked the cake itself with no problems at all and even managed to cut it in half relatively evenly :) I put all the buttercream and jam in the middle and then covered the top and sides with buttercream like we had done in class the previous week and covered the cake with a large sheet of sugarpaste I had rolled out. Apart from a couple of little iffy bits and a couple of holes I had to disguise, it didn't go too badly.

I know Laura really likes marzipan so I decided to make the teddy bear again. It's amazing how things never quite work out how you want when you're not following a teacher and being given step by step instructions, but it wasn't too bad, though he looked a little drunk and he wouldn't sit up straight lol and I'd put it near the back of the cake so I could decorate in front of it and write Happy Birthday but it looked like he would just lean all the way back off the cake! So I did edge him closer to the middle which unfortunately created a bit of a mess on the sugarpaste. I used my cunning and cookie cutters and created some stars which nicely covered it all. I ended up doing 3 star creations dotted around the cake and I also did a butterfly. Again using the skills learned in class I did a sugarpaste rose which came out fine, I was happy with that bit! Haha.

I managed to find my steady hand and wrote happy birthday Laura on the cake - not perfectly but I was happy with it for a first attempt. I think it was mostly the bear I wasn't happy with - I just wanted him to sit up properly! Plus I'd somehow managed to make him super sized - a few too many McDonalds methinks! But despite all the issues I was happy with the overall look of the cake especially considering it was the first time I had made one properly, I'm sure I'll improve with practice. Speaking of which, a colleague of mine has asked me to make her a birthday cake which is brilliant! Looking forward to it already, I just need to think of a design!

I also made the marshmallow cupcakes which I have previously blogged about - see here.