My second birthday cake!

First of all, please accept my MOST deepest and sincere apologies for missing MM this week. I had something planned but unfortunately, with moving, and my sister's surprise birthday party and everything in between, life got hectic. REGARDLESS, no excuse is good enough as this was my second week *runs into corner and hides*

BUT...hopefully this post will bring me back in the good books. I've been planning and scheming and organizing my sister's party for the past few weeks and have been ITCHING to blog about it. It's finally over and I can blog to my heart's content!!

The first birthday cake I ever made was for a very good friend of mine. It was a 2 tiered square cake. I'll do a more detailed post on it later. It was good for a first attempt and I had a TONNE of help from my roommate but I still couldn't see past its flaws. The Transformers cake I made for my sister was my second ever and took a tonne of planning and research. I made a cupcake tower...yes..the tower...as well as all the cupcakes and the cake at the top. I also had to do all this into the very late hours of the night as it was a surprise.

I used my very favourite chocolate cake recipe for the 8 inch cake. I had to buy the fondant and the buttercream for the crumb coat because I was pressed for time and had no energy. I used chocolate buttercream to fill the cake after I torted it and also used it to cover the cake. I made sure the cake was even and flat and straight. I watched videos on YouTube like this and this to figure out a technique.

I then covered the cake in yellow fondant. I coloured all the fondant 24 hrs before hand. That was definitely the most fun part about this cake....okay I'm lying. It was a pain. Especially getting the black to be black. I sweat up a storm and my shoulders ached the next day.

Once I got the cake covered, the rest was easy. I printed out a picture of the Transformers logo thingy...which in case you haven't caught on is the theme of the cake( I wondered many times in this process whether I had a sister or a brother. Trying to make a transformers cake look girly is VERY hard) and used a knife to free hand cut the different parts out of grey fondant. I guess it would have looked neater if I traced around the printout and cut it into sections but at 2 in the am, I wasn't thinking straight.

I mixed some silver lustre dust with peppermint extract and brushed it onto the cutouts. I painted some areas more dense than others to get a metally, worn out effect. Not sure if it worked :S. I then positioned it onto the cake and cut black strips of fondant to add to the sides. TA DAAA...the cake was ready to 'roll out'...get it? like the Autobots rolling out....okay I'll stop.

So that was it. I'll do another post on the cupcakes and the cupcake tower all made from scratch. I am so proud of this cake and the look on my sisters face when she saw it was totally worth it!!