I don't cry. I bake...My Birthday Cake!

MY BIRTHDAY CAKE!!

One of the things I've been obsessed with lately are tiered wedding cakes. I've been cake-stalking online for so long and as much as I like novelty cakes (a la Planet Cake) I still can't stop going through galleries and galleries of tiered weddings cakes. I became wrapped up with the idea of making one and since I'm not at the level where I consider myself worthy of making a wedding cake for weddings (like Sharon Wee, Faye Cahill and Peggy Porschen...maybe one day *sigh*) I thought why not make one for myself?

No, not for MY upcoming wedding! We've been through this I'm not the one getting married. I decided to make my own 2-tiered birthday cake. Who said tiered cakes are only for weddings, hmm?? I know, I know...it's a little sad making your own birthday cake...but a baker's gotta do what a baker's gotta do to practise. When I attended the Planet Cake cupcake class one of the teachers told us that the way she got into her sugar art career was by making her own birthday cake. People at her party were so impressed they started asking her to make cakes for them. Inspirational, non?

Since I'm a baker-on-a-budget I had to figure out how to put together a tiered cake without having to attend a class. So after weeks of researching online and in baking books I was able to work out the basics of assembling a tiered cake. My bestie bought me the Peggy Porschen Cake Chic book which had instructions on everything from how to bake cookies to assembling a tiered cake! Ahhh bless my bestie's heart.

oopsy, the tin was smaller than i thought so had to make an extra mini cake.
which became my afternoon tea- see i told you there are no tears in baking :)

white chocolate mud cake batter

So as you can imagine I spent my entire birthday weekend surrounded by all things baking. I stayed up till midnight making a white chocolate mud cake for the bottom tier followed by a smaller coconut cake for the top tier. My back was actually aching from standing for so long but like a determined baker I soldiered on and made my HUGE bowl of ganache the next day.

gooey-lala

Standing for about 1-2 hours I ganached both cakes and then finally was ready to assemble...

ta da!!!

Perhaps if you are a wedding cake maker you can tell me whether or not I was overreacting but I sure felt overwhelmed when something I had been dreaming of became reality.

I nearly shed a tear as the top tier and bottom tier became one.

I'm not game enough to try fondant yet so I took a bit of inspiration from Faye Cahill's website to finish off the cake with minimal decorations. Enter the pink ribbon from the box of cupcakes my sister had delivered to me a few days ago!

Just when you thought this post was over there is still more sugar to talk about! I love celebrating my birthdays and this year I decided to treat my good friends to a dessert feast, a small little sugar soiree to be exact. I asked everyone to come after dinner (and to make sure they left some room for dessert).

As for the rest of the sugar spread that's a bit of a story. I had planned to make some cookies from Peggy's book but seeing that I had about 1/2 a bowl of ganache left (better safe than sorry I guess) I had to find some ways to use it as part of the collection. My first thought was marshmallows and melted ganache (sweet!) and then some chocolates. Before I go on, I would like to share the following with you: "There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn..."- Richard Bach.

You see, I thought I could make some heart-shaped chocolates using the leftover ganache but little did I know ganache doesn't actually harden no matter how much you freeze it. So here I was spooning melted ganache into plastic heart moulds thinking I was going to have some heart-shaped chocs by the end of it...only to find out about an hour later that I had to squeeze them all out again cos there was no way the ganache was going to harden in the freezer. EPIC FAIL. Sigh...anyways just for your viewing pleasure I did take a photo of the process before the disappointing discovery. Quite a pretty picture so here you go:

such a (pretty) EPIC fail

So what did I do with the rest of the ganache? I made them into chocolate cups with frozen berries. Another lesson I learnt was that it might have been a good idea to put some crushed biscuits in the paper cups before the ganache went in because my guests had to squeeze the chocolate out of the cups. However, I didn't hear anyone complain so I guess there is no such thing as a difficult way to eat chocolate?

Chocolate Cups with Berries

 I displayed the sweet things in such a way as inspired by the "spreads" I've seen in wedding photos and blogs such as this elaborate spread on My Sweet and Saucy. Since it was the Easter weekend I gave my spread a bit of an Easter theme and made use of a heart-shaped twig decoration as a cupcake "nest". ^_^

Cupcakes, Marshmallow and Chocolate Cup Tree
(Cupcakes are from Pattisons)

The Cupcake Nest

Birthday song time!!

time to eat!

The party itself was a blast. I couldn't think of any other way to spend my birthday- baking, decorating and then feeding my friends the fruits of my labour. In the words of LeAnn Rimes:

 "I love you all....Now let's have some cake, bitches!"

Happy Friday, everyone!

love,

idontcryieat

P.S. Kudos to my friend, Albie, for some of the SLR quality photos of the spread :)