Doc McStuffins Clinic Cake

I try to put a lot of energy into doing really ambitious cakes for my kids' own birthdays. This weekend we were celebrating my daughter Darcy's 4th birthday. She's a big, big fan of Doc McStuffins and asked for a Doc McStuffins' themed cake. I decided to attempt to make her clinic.

Sadly this is one of the occasions where I was really disappointed with the result, though it took me about six solid hours of work to do the thing. I think I just came out looking a bit sloppy and not at all how I envisioned. Lucky for me she is four and easily impressed.

A little side note: For a while now I've been using Dr Oetker cake release spray. I think this stuff is brilliant, my cakes don't stick at all, they come out of the tin like a dream. My local tesco appears to have stopped stocking it so I ordered some from The Craft Company. Now there is a bit of a post-office mix up which involved the Craft Company's customer service doing their absolute best and Royal Mail blowing up a parcel, but long story short I had cakes to make and no cake release spray yet. I got the husband to call into the craft store in town to see if they sold it. They didn't but they did stock PME Release a Cake. Now maybe I was doing something wrong but I found this stuff to be absolutely dreadful. Two cakes in a row ended up with half of stuck to the bottom of the tin so when I turned them out great hulking wedges of cake were torn from the centre. I was NOT impressed. Thankfully a day later the Dr Oetker spray arrived and balance was restored to the universe, and the PME Release-a-Cake swiftly went into the bin. 

Chelsea FC Cake

Sometimes you are asked to do a cake and you end up scratching your head wondering.... how the heck am I going to manage this? My aunt asked me to make a Chelsea FC cake for my cousin's birthday and I looked at the logo (easy to do as the husband is a devoted Chelsea fan) and thought I can't model this!

eBay came to the rescue. On a few occasions now I have ordered printed icing sheets from there. They are fairly cheap and very easy to use and give a lovely professional looking finish to cakes. I really recommend these over toppers printed onto rice paper as I think they tend to look really faded out and a bit rubbish.

I actually love getting to do the occasional cake like this but they look great but take about half an hour to assemble so are hugely relaxing to do. 

Minion Cake

Last weekend when I friend asked me to make a cake for her little boy's birthday I was quite pleased at the vote of confidence, but I was also ridiculously pushed for time because it was also my daughter's 4th birthday and she was looking for a quite complicated cake herself. 

Luckily, pinterest came to the rescue once again and I got the design for this very simple and incredibly easy Minion cake. It was the work of minutes with my round cutters and some silver metallic food paint to create this.