Some families have the custom of waiting to cut a little boy’s hair until he is 3 years old. When my nephew turned 3, we celebrated his birthday with a party and a hair cutting ceremony.  He needed the perfect cake for the celebration!  I love this new look of making a shorter bottom tier, then a super tall center tier, and a small top tier.  I have been doing it a lot lately, and I’m not sick of it yet!

On the bottom tier I draped some fondant tzitzit, traditional garb for a boy starting at 3 years old.  To make the strings I used my clay extruder and some white fondant.  It’s definitely one of my favorite non cake tools!

For the center tier I used a fish scale pattern cutter and placed these fondant cutouts in a randomized pattern.  Then I added a pair of gum paste hair scissors.  One of the kids at the party thought they were real!  That was a huge compliment.

The cake was topped off with a fondant yarmulke and 3 fondant candles.  Happy 3rd Birthday Aryeh!

Sometimes simple cakes are harder than more detailed designs.  This cake was really fun to design.  It was made for a small celebration, so the family didn’t want anything too big. Just because the cake needed to be small; this is a 6″ round cake that measures 6″ tall as well; doesn’t mean it needs to be boring!  I covered the cake and the cake board in gray fondant.  I had to do a good job of covering the cake since there were not many decorations to cover mistakes!  I really wanted to wrap the cake in a NYC skyline so I designed a really cool fondant cutter for my husband to print for me.  We ran into all sorts of problems, it would have been quicker for me to cut it by hand, but we were determined to get it right! After applying the black skyline, it looked a little flat and dark, so I added some yellow squares for windows.  I also added some silver stars in the sky.

I made the cake topper a few days in advance to allow it to dry and harden.  I hand cut the batman symbol out of black fondant and attached it to a thin yellow piece of gum paste. Once it was dry, I attached it to a lollipop stick using stiff royal icing and placed it into the cake.  I added another tapered piece of yellow gum paste down the top and side of the cake to make it look like it was shining into the sky.  Happy 3rd Birthday Alex!

Okay, first of all, I can’t believe it has been a year since I made Harry his Pirate Birthday Cake.  These days, I guess I measure my time in cake.  This years sports themed cake was really fun to make!  Lately, I am obsessed with cake toppers. Since they didn’t request any specific sports teams to be represented, I was a little unsure what I was going to create.  I thought, maybe I would make a baseball hat, but then I would have to choose colors, and that would get complicated.  Then the idea hit me, and I created a gum paste trophy!

I colored my gum paste a bright shade of yellow and used a tutorial to create this fun topper.  I handmade all of  the pieces a few days in advance and allowed them to dry.  I made sure to poke a hole in the center of each piece so I could use a skewer to keep the whole thing standing for delivery.  My greatest fear is creating an amazing cake only to have it collapse during travel.  So I always make sure to construct my cakes with lots of support.  When it was time to assemble, I glued all the pieces together using sugar glue and royal icing (for the handles) and then airbrushed the trophy in shiny gold.

I covered the top tier in sky blue fondant and hand painted fluffy white clouds using white gel food coloring.  My white gel color is very thin to begin with so I didn’t need to thin it out with vodka or lemon extract.

The bottom tier was covered in a really pretty shade of green and made to look like a football field.  I love the grass on this cake, it’s one of my favorite features to add to cakes.  The grass was  rolled out of two different shades of green fondant using a textured rolling pin and then hand cut.  I only glued the bottom of the strips of grass and bent the tops of the blades out and down to create movement.

I covered the cake board in white fondant and then used different sized star cutters to create this fun look.  I really love that extra touch on this cake!  Happy Birthday Harry!