Let Them Eat Cake! #1 - cherry blossom enchanted woodland cake

What's a celebration without cake?

I can still remember the beautiful, colorful cakes my mom would make for our birthdays when my sister and I were kids. Each one was unique. They were completely homemade, and so delicious! Sometimes someone would complain that the frosting was too sweet, but I loved it! I would eat the cake and save the frosting for last... I've always had a huge sweet tooth. When I got a little older, around the age of 10, I started taking over the making of birthday cakes in our family. I love to bake, and I love doing art, and decorating a cake sort of feels like a combination of the two. Plus, once I got the hang of the whole thing, I was able to whip up a bowl of frosting in a few minutes! (Remember that sweet tooth I mentioned? Yeah, sometimes, I would make a bowl of frosting, just to eat it. With a spoon. Straight up. OML!)

As I got older, I got more ambitious, and started banging out more complex cakes, with more complex frosting. I love working with Swiss Meringue Buttercream now, even though it takes some time to put together. It's not nearly as sickly sweet as that good old American stuff, and it's a dream to pipe. As long as it's not too hot. When it's too hot, Swiss buttercream melts! (As seen starting to happen here in the middle pic, on my daughter's smash cake. Hooray for heat waves. :P)

I've since started making cakes as a little at-home side business. The more practice I get from them, the more ambitious I become. So this year, for my daughter's 2nd birthday, I knew I had to do something amazing. And fortunately, this year, there was no such heat wave!

Little miss is an animal lover. She has a deer obsession... we often go for evening walks, and she always asks to go "deer hunting" (walking through the big cemetery a block away from our house, searching for the deer that like to hang out there). Squirrels are a close second, and there are plenty of them to observe on our walks as well. The sheer joy they bring her is amazing. So I knew I had to have some sort of deer or woodland theme.

When we were doing some shopping, I came across some cute and colorful mini cupcake wrappers. She fell in love with one set in particular, so I knew I wanted to use them for her birthday. I thought the minis would be perfect for the kids to be able to pop into their mouths, since we were planning to have the party at a nearby park. Plus they were so cute and colorful, I knew I could draw inspiration from them for the color scheme of the cake.

I had a few ideas of what I'd like to do, but when I was browsing the interwebs for inspiration, I saw someone use their giant cupcake pan to make a tree, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. And thus, I made this cherry blossom tree cake!

The color of the frosting was hard to capture. The first image is truer to life, as it was sitting in the direct sunlight. The yellow/golden tips on the flowers is from gold lustre dust that I brushed on, which made the whole thing sparkle like it was from an enchanted fairy kingdom. lol (Too bad it didn't photograph that way!)

It took WAY too long to find the little figures I wanted to add to the cake, but her reaction made all the frustration worthwhile.

Baby girl LOVES peaches, so I made a small batch of peach jam, to use as a filling for her cake. And since I didn't want to overwhelm the peach flavor, I decided it'd be best to do a simple vanilla cake and frosting. But what's a sparkly, enchanted cake, if it's plain and boring on the inside?! So, it had to be funfetti!

The kids annihilated the cupcakes, as you can see. lol

Little miss was very pleased, and everyone enjoyed it. And I had so much fun putting it all together!

What are your family birthday traditions? What's your favorite kind of cake? Would you like to see recipes/making-of posts for future cake endeavors? Let me know!

Have a magical day!

Megan