Sunday, November 27, 2011

Now he is 1!!

Wow, my youngest son Quinn has recently turned 1yo, what a fabulous milestone!

We celebrated his actual birthday with a low key evening with just my husband and our three boys, with my grandparents popping by in the afternoon as they couldn't make it to his birthday party. I decorated our house with a bright and colourful bunting, which I had made earlier in the week. We filled the kid's playroom with balloons which Quinn just loved. I made an Easy Banana Cake in a loaf tin, which tasted just divine, so light and fluffy, a big hit in our house. For perfection with cutting the cake, we gave Quinn an engraved Laguoile cake knife for his birthday which we hope will last all of his birthdays to come!

A few days later we had a birthday bash with many of our extended family and friends joining us to celebrate Quinn's 1st birthday! I had decided to make a number 1 cake for his birthday party as I had done the same shape for our older boys, the only thing I needed to work out was how to decorate it. Our eldest had a race track theme, our middle son had a train track, so my husband thought it would be great to have aeroplanes! I did a bit of thinking and googling for some inspiration and ended up coming up with an idea which I drafted out in Photoshop first and then kept my fingers crossed that it would turn out ok on the actual cake!

The birthday party cake was a White Chocolate Mud Cake recipe from Nigella Lawson. It tasted delicious but boy oh boy did it take a long time to cook! As I was making a very large cake using 3-4 times the amount of ingredients, it took well over 3hrs to cook in our dodgy little oven! I decided to attempt my second ever fondant cake and because I like a challenge I thought I'd try my luck at marshmallow fondant too, as an extra layer under the blue fondant just in case I mucked up the blue fondant it would be easy enough to take off and try again. I know I could have used ready made white fondant or royal icing but where's the fun in that! So the layering went like this 1) Cake 2) White Choc Ganache 3) Marshmallow Fondant and 5) Blue Fondant (pre coloured from a local cake supply store). After colouring some fondant for the shapes and font, I cut out the aeroplanes, clouds, letters and grass by hand. All up it was a much more time consuming process than I had anticipated but I was really happy with the end result and everyone loved it!

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