Tuesday, August 7, 2012

You are my Sunshine!

This week is the great cake week, more on that here! And today's cake is all about the song "You are my sunshine". Know that one?
Yesterday's cakes were echidnas. And, as mentioned, this is all a part of a very big cake week here at our house. Or rather the onslaught of birthday season - August. We have the birthdays of two small people in this week, and another one late in the month.

So I started this cake with one of these. A good, strong coffee. The other was for Mr Nearly-Finished-Writing!!! He is home doing edits, and therefore deserving of coffee:-) He needed a coffee after lunch to stay alert, I needed one to fill me with strength...


You see, I had a lovely chocolate mud cake. All cooked and ready to ice. Well, nearly ready... Here she is. Can you see the problem? Hmmm. Really it's not that serious, given it's a cake for our family to cut after dinner in celebration of the gorgeous girl's birthday. No-one else would see it (bar our household) before "Happy Birthday" was sung. 
 

Well, I cut it. Straight across. I wanted it level. A level icing surface. It was a scary cutting process (thus the need for coffee prior). And I am not sure that it ended up being level, certainly not dead level. I think it was better though ;-)


The gorgeous girl had made another request. She's good at those! Yesterday it was for echidnas, today it was for a sun on her cake. Hmmm. Not so hard I thought. And remember I'd had a weekend away, so I decided to cheat a little. Make life a little bit easier today. Normally I would make my own icing, from scratch, but not today. Today it was white frosting in a jar for the cloudy background and that fancy roll out icing to form the sun and it's rays... always fun having an excuse to play with food colouring!


Here are the rays going on...


Then the addition of a tiny bit of bling; some lippy and sunnies.


And there she is. Little Miss Sunshine. The nice thing about this is that (being baby #1) the gorgeous girl was often sung that little song, "You are my Sunshine". While we rocked her over our shoulder, just after a feed and just for a brief moment before bed. She was our sunshine, a joyous baby who totally followed the textbook, smiled often, slept well and generally led us to believe that all babies were this good. If only we'd known... the next one was no sunshine;-) And it's his birthday next. So tomorrow is cooking day again. We're going to make my classic cake, the 2-4-6-8 cake. Ready for a great recipe? Get your notebooks out for tomorrow... Catch you then, we're off to make a cuppa to have with our cake (and you know how I feel about a cup of tea)!