Adventures in Cakemaking

Tomorrow it is my daughter's 6th birthday. Despite toying with the idea of just buying an ice-cream cake from Wendy's, I now have a well established tradition in our family of making cakes from scratch. The problem is this is a party cake and it requires a bit more preparation than the cakes I make for family gatherings.

I also have horrible memories of my last party cake for Lucinda where I went all-out. It was made using the Wilton Castle Cake kit and, naively, I assumed "kit" meant simple to construct. Alas, no. It involved watching about 15 hours of Youtube videos, reading Cake on The Brain's blog , learning more than I ever dreamed necessary to make a tiered cake, lots of trial and error and dare I say it, swearing. I don't think I have ever sworn that much (I'm embarassed just thinking about) but it was 1 a.m., tiny silver balls I was placing around the window frames with tweezers kept sliding off the royal icing, everyone else was asleep, and I was just over it.

And the next day, at Lucinda's party, I was a walking zombie and the cake Mark (I discovered he was a deft hand with the royal icing piping) and I had spent hours toiling over was deconstructed and destroyed straight after "Happy Birthday" had been sung.

This year, my animal loving daughter is getting a girlified version of "Fred the Dog" from The Complete Book of Home Baking by Ken Fin books. I'm fairly sure this book will be out of print now as my husband bought it from a hawker about 15 years ago but the actual cake recipes are of the no-fail, triple-tested quality so I am not expecting a flop cake result.

I better get started.