Kids Dish

So I have a plan: I’m basing my birthday cake recipe this year on one I found in a party cake hand out. I loved the combinations of pink and yellow, and these are two of Raeli’s favourite colours (along with, you know, all the others…) The effect I want is a fairy cake, basically. Fairies are Raeli’s greatest obsession, possibly (finally!) edging out the Wiggles.

The basic premise of it is a plain vanilla cake frosted with a buttery yellow ganache, and fillwed with layers of butter cream and chopped turkish delight. I’m thinking I’ll use chopped strawberries as well, either mixed in together or as stripes. The other main feature of the cake in the book is soft pink sweets pressed into the icing. They used something called Fizzos (Fizzees?) which I’ve never heard of, plus ribbon bows pinned into the icing (I don’t think so!) and an elaborate Persian fairy floss (???) over the top.

Anyway, leaving aside the actual things they used, I figure it would be easy enough to find a variety of pink sweeties to decorate the yellow cake with. But no - at least, not by the contents of my local supermarket. Most of the sweets I saw there were huge, prepackaged things, far too ungainly for the cake I have in my head. And then there’s the whole choking hazard issue… and the fact that, really, she’s too little to get her hooked on sweets. Oh, and she hates marshmallows.

Maybe I need to go back to basics. Sigh. I bought a couple of containers of dollars and other pretty (tiny) cake sprinkles, but they’re not quite the effect I wanted. I suspect I’m going to have to look further afield for something a touch more exotic in the cake-decoration field.

Like a cake decorating shop? Gah. Actual shopping.

Anyway, Little Miss’s birthday is next Sunday, so I’ll make a test version of her cake, probably mostly in the form of cupcakes, so she can take some into Daycare the next week. And the Grand Cake will be for her party, on Aurelia Day (the plebs call it Australia Day - my girl has her own public holiday!)

Gah. Shops. Town. I suppose it’s too late to mail order this stuff???