Birthday Cake

I don't know about you but I think that when you're a kid, your birthday cake is a big deal.  I remember a doll cake made by Mom that was beautiful, or so I thought.  My Mom is a professional cake decorator.  She's been doing it for over 40 years!  She's made some gorgeous cakes in that time.  So cakes were always kind of a thing when I was growing up.  And there were always scraps of cake to be slathered with a bit of icing to eat!  Funny thing is I don't even like cake that much but I can't resist it that way.  

This week was Peter's tenth birthday...double digits for the boy now.  Because he is into all things related to airplanes, especially WWII airplanes, I suggested an airplane cake for his birthday.  He was very excited about the idea.  I think I made a few stepmom points for that one.

Paul has a great artist's eye so he started designing the structure.  After the pirate ship cake fiasco a few years ago, he's now more aware of the limitations of the medium.  (The back end of the ship collapsed at about midnight the night before!)  He decided on the appropriate plane and sketched out a pattern for getting all the pieces out of two 9"x13" cakes.  Here is the beginning of the cake structure.

Once the basic structure was figured out, I crumb iced the cake.  Crumb icing gives the cake a thinnish layer of icing to catch the crumbs and keep them from getting into the decorated cake. 









Next we had to create just the right color for the airplane.  Something drab green without being unappetizing!  I iced the cake and then worked on smoothing out the icing and adding the details.

 

Finally, Paul added the propeller and tail, red for the Tuskegee Airmen, and the P-51B was finished.  (Click on the photo for better detail.)

Thanks to Mom for all the cake decorating skills-by-osmosis.  By the way, Peter was absolutely thrilled!  That's a good thing to be on your 10th birthday.