A 5th birthday cake to impress!

It was recently my son's fifth birthday and for the first time we were having a party with his new school friends. Of course, I wanted to impress. I had never met most of the parents of the kids in his class and I was nervous. I have always had this dream that I would become friends with my son's friend's parents. That we can hang out and drink wine or beer while the kids play, then we can walk home (yep, these fantasy friends live close to home, so no need to worry about who needs to be the driver). This little fantasy has never panned out... maybe it's because I am a little introverted, or maybe it's because I never see another parent due to my son being the first at before school care and one of the last to be picked up in the afternoon. Hmmm I'm not painting the best picture of myself here for future friends... a drunk who works to hard and doesn't talk to strangers. That's not really me, promise. Anyway, back to my point... I wanted to impress with this birthday cake.

I started planning the cake. I thought Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - perfect, he loves them and so do most other 5 year old boys. Problem, all the cakes I found were a little difficult, and I saw many failed attempts online, so started researching Plan B... Spiderman. This was much better. I found a design in the shape of a number 5 cake, all I needed was red icing. I started making my cake - easy. Then I made the icing, as I knew my red food colouring would need a few hours to get nice and deep. The cakes came out of the oven perfectly and after resting them, I shaped them. I kept looking at my icing... after 3 hours it was still pink. I was not going to impress my son, his friends AND the Mum's with a pink Spiderman cake. I had to think quick as it was obvious the red was not going to happen. I only had about half an hour until I needed to be in the park by this point, so grabbed some sprinkles and covered the cake with vanilla buttercream and hundreds and thousands.

The cake wasn't as cool as I had hoped, but no one cared. Everyone loved it. Every Mum that arrived commented on it and the kids at the party lined up for seconds. I would say that was a success!

The recipe for the cake I used was this one - the double chocolate cake.

I iced the cake with a basic buttercream (butter, icing sugar, vanilla extract and milk).

Then I decorated it using hundreds and thousands. Easy, yes ;-).

PS - these fruit kebabs with marshmallows were the first to be eaten, an absolute winner and so easy. I recommend.