My beautiful niece turned 5 this June. She is my little-bestie. I love her, and she loves her "Meme." This year, she chose strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream and wanted a Max and Ruby birthday party. I pinned several cakes on Pinterest and discussed options with my Sis-in-law. She and I decided to use THIS CAKE and THIS CAKE to model Emma's cake after.
I have usually made my own fondant for all of my cakes in the past. However, with my internship going on and because I had so many things to mold, I opted to buy it. I bought Duff brand and Wilton brand fondant. My fondant tends to be slightly dry as well, and with molding characters, I knew I would need something moist and pliable.
I got the blue Duff fondant to cover the cake. It tasted GREAT, just as good as my homemade fondant that is made with marshmallow, water, powdered sugar, and almond extract. I bought a pack of white Wilton fondant and two multi-packs of Wilton fondant. I used the Wilton on all of the cake decorations.
I used edible markers to draw on Max and Ruby's clothes. The pack didn't come with a black marker, so I used a felt tipped pen and made sure no one ate Max or Ruby's head (haha). My friend Laura helped me mold Ruby because I had never made 3D models like this before, but I made Max all by myself :)
The coolest technique we used was for the pine trees. We made green cones with fondant and took scissors and snipped all over the tree to make it look more like a tree.
Emma let out the most heart-warming squeal when she saw her cake and she told me a thousand times that weekend that I was the best cake-baker in the world. Man I love her!!
For those of you who are like me and know nothing about kids' cartoons these days, this is what Max and Ruby look like:
Here are the pictures of Emma's Cake!
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE my niece Emma and nephew Evan. They are the sweetest, most kindhearted, and bright-eyed little children ever! I have the ultimate privilege of making their birthday cakes each year. This year was no exception. Luckily, Evan's birthday party fell the weekend on the end of my spring break from law school, and Emma's birthday is in June, while I'm out for summer [see my next post for Emma's cake].
Evan had chocolate cake with chocolate ganache covered with fondant in a Team Umizoomi theme. Evan loves the cartoon (and I've never seen it haha). I used a lot of bright colors and basic shapes on Evan's cake. I printed some images of Geo and Bot and took them to Lowe's Foods and had them printed onto edible paper. I transferred those images to fondant and put them on the cake. This way they would be pretty exact. While I think I could probably make the images with fondant after a lot of hard work and intricate cutting, I am a hopeless perfectionist and its much less stressful to use an actual image.
I made a pennant bunting with Evan's name on it and a fondant "2" and used those for the topper.
The cake went over SO well and Evan and his Momma, my sweet sis-in-law, loved it!!
Let me know what you think!
