So the second spawn turned 2 this weekend (send help I have a toddler) and for her Birthday I wanted to do the nice mum thing and make her a birthday cake. I wanted to Betty Crocker that shit!!! I planned to make her a BLUEY Swimming Pool cake- so its basically a cake with chocolate stick biscuits arounds the cake and on top blue jelly. It was a cake I had when I was a kid (minus the Bluey Characters). I was excited about making this for her.
For some reason when it comes to baking Birthday cakes I stress myself out and always have issues, I always had it in my head that I couldn’t bake or really cook. I can bake, I can bake cakes without any issue but for for some reason I choke when it comes to someones birthday. I ended up deciding to not make the cake to save myself the stress of baking, but I would buy a ready make cake and decorate it so then I knew it wouldn’t go tits up. I can make buttercream and decorate with no issues. In the supermarket I found a sponge cake with two layers that you could buy and all you had to add was the inside and icing. PERFECT!
The two layers were a little thick so I decided to cut them in half and put buttercream in between each layer ( I actually bought 2 cake to make sure that if I had any issues with one of the layers I had back up). I thought it would be great to make strawberry flavoured buttercream and found a really easy recipe online using real strawberries. Making the buttercream started off surprisingly easy, I was feeling confident and was following the recipe to the letter. When I say that I was following it to the letter I mean I was constantly making sure every single step I did was exactly as was required via the recipe. All of a sudden it went downhill very quickly with the buttercream it went from a beautiful smooth consistency to creamy strawberry soup. It couldn’t be salvaged, I had to make up some new buttercream.
After providing my family with a rainbow of swearing I pulled myself together and made an emergency trip to the supermarket to get more ingredients to make more buttercream. This time I was just going to go simple and make my regular stuff- I can’t fuck this up. tile my mad dash through the baking and spices Isle I came across a buttercream mix pack. All I had to do was add water and butter to the power and it will come out icing. At this point I thought “well its nice and simple, Ive wasted enough time on this shit why the fuck not”.
I bought two packs to make sure I had more than enough for the cake. When mixing the icing pack it worked so well I even added it blue food dye to make the cake blue to make in with the jelly- which might I add I had made up earlier and was in the fridge ready to go (that was one success first go that night). The icing was ready to go, it was ready for the cake. Lets do this!!! The cake itself was really soft and I tried some of the bits I cut off and it was really tasty. When it came to icing the layers it really went to shit. Every time I was spreading the icing the icing would either not sit on the cake or would break of the cake as I spread it. I changed over to using an icing bag to see if that would help things…….it did not the icing kept following the tube and tearing the delicate cake.
I managed to pile all of the layers on the cake, with a lot of frustration (the top was cut in order to put the jelly inside for the pool). The cakes layers were ere all crumbly and I thought I could cover the shit-storm that was the cake with the icing to salvage its appearance. The cake was too soft for the icing it just kept tearing more and more it was not working at all. I can’t emphasise how bad it was falling apart with the icing. The icing wouldn’t stick and it would tear up the cake. I couldn’t serve this to all of our family. So after laying on the kids play room floor crying while covered in blue icing I pulled myself together and made the decision to order the damn cake.
The next morning my husband went out early to pick up a cake and we put the BLUEY figurines on the top of the cake. Everyone enjoyed the cake we bought including the Birthday Spawn of course. This was without a doubt one of my biggest fails, I think for the next few years Ill just stick to buying Birthday cakes to save me having another meltdown.
IM OUT!!!
SHE GAVE IT A TRY 