Lily's Birthday Cake

I'm feeling a little guilty for neglecting my blog this week - its been necessary as I've been busy, but at the same time I'm really enjoying doing my blog at the moment. I have several things to update about, but I figured I'd just do a small update, focusing on Lily's birthday cake.

This coming week (on Wednesday) it will be Lily's 6th birthday. Yesterday (Saturday) she had her birthday party for her friends at school. She'd asked me to make her a special cake and of course, I wanted to do something for her that she would love. Both girls are really into Disney's Frozen at the moment so it came as no surprise that Lily would want a Frozen birthday cake.

Now let me give you a little background on my cake making... I've never really been one for artsy and crafty stuff. I'm definitely not artistic. However this time last year (Lily's 5th birthday), I had decided I wanted to make her a fairly spectacular Alice in Wonderland cake, as she'd asked for an Alice in Wonderland themed party. There wasn't particularly a reason for wanting to make the cake, just that I fancied doing it. I was a stay at home mum, spending every day in the house, so I had plenty of time to perfect the cake. The whole thing was very much a learning curve but over the space of about a week, I managed to come up with a fairly good Alice in Wonderland cake.

Sadly, I made somewhat of a rod for my own back, resulting in a year of cake making - my friends affectionately refer to 2013 as "the year of the cake". After Lily's birthday cake, I made one for my partner Chris, another for my brother, another for my friend Tom, a baby shower cake for Nat, a Portal birthday cake for Jon (followed by a coffin cake for his joint birthday/Halloween party), a couple of cheesecake birthday cakes and finally Megan's birthday cake. I swore by the end of the year that my cake making was over as it had become so time consuming, especially now I was working too.

However... right after Christmas, I treated myself to this baby:

which then resulted in me drunkenly posting...

In all honesty, I wasn't really that drunk. I knew what I was posting and ultimately if I didn't want to make cake, I wouldn't. In fact, I've managed to get almost 2 months into the year, without making any cakes for birthdays. Last week I made a simple sandwich cake for my sister's birthday and this week I made one for a person I work with. However Lily's was a week long ongoing project as it was a little more special than the other two.

Anyway I won't get into the making process as it wasn't really anything spectacular. Lily asked for 3 tiers, but I got her to settle on 2. They were both just simple vanilla sponge, though the top layer was blue sponge with white buttercream and the bottom one was regular coloured sponge with blue buttercream. I decorated both in roll icing, with fairly minimal decorating (I bought the characters to go on top). The most interesting part was definitely working with the Isomalt as I'd never done anything like that before.

And this was the finished cake!

I have to admit that, while the design was fairly simple, I'm really pleased with how it came out. I know its not really as spectacular as some of the other cakes I've made, or as well finished, but I'm still happy with it. More importantly, Lily loved it and that's all that matters to me at the end of the day.