One of my delights in being mum is in planning, baking and decorating celebration cakes throughout the year.  The children are both summer babies so its been a busy time in the kitchen getting ready for birthdays.  My cakes are not the picture perfect images of those on Pinterest but real cakes made by an amateur baker who stirs in love, happy memories and positive thoughts into every cake.

This year, the children were both very decisive in what they wanted for their cake, Little Man wanted a Minecraft cake and Little Miss a watermelon cake.  I took my inspiration from Pinterest whilst being realistic about what I could manage.   My cakes are not simply about decoration, as I choose their flavour very carefully too.

For Little Man’s Minecraft cake, I chose to make a citrus cake, choosing an orange cake with a lime cream cheese filling.  It was a very refreshing cake and helped to counter the sweetness of the icing and decoration.  Although I had several ideas on how to decorate the cake, I ended up with a very simple ‘Creeper’ picture surrounded by random Minecraft tiles.  His name and age were made from black icing and created by using alphabet cutters.

For Little Miss with a brief of watermelon I wanted to do all I could to make her cake look and taste like the fruit.  I was able to find watermelon essence online and it was a quality product.  I added it to a simple sponge mix, with some red food dye to make it look like the watermelon fruit and also added some chocolate chips to the mix as ‘seeds’ This was definitely a cake with an impressive wow factor when you cut it open (although I managed to forget to take a photo of the inside of the cake!) The sponge was filled with a water melon cream cheese filling.  Again I was considering different ways to decorate the cake with icing but chose simplicity; a bright pink icing base with more choc chips as seeds.  I really liked the unusual flavour of this cake, it felt like a taste of summer.   I’ve since tried cupcake variations of this cake for a cake sale which were well received.

It is one of my simple pleasures to bake my children a birthday cake, its just one of those little things I do, along with the birthday breakfast table (think balloons, lights, banners etc..) to make them feel very special on their big days.