November is Birthday Month!

November is a big birthday month! My boy Jake will be turning 3 and a few of my friends are celebrating their little one's birthday as well so it's going to be a busy month with quite a few exciting cakes for me to work on.

First of, I would like to apologise to those of you who tried to contact me for orders in the month of October. As you can tell from the lack of updates in October, I was away on vacation with the family. While we had a great time feasting up a storm in Italy and Shanghai, I did miss my baking and blogging and being in touch with readers who were kind enough to enquire about my cakes. Well, I'm now back and one of the first cakes I made upon returning is for a good friend's daughter.

While preparing to make Lauren's cake, I was introduced to the world of 'Bubble Guppies'. For the unacquainted, Bubble Guppies is a popular preschool comedy musical children's television series by Nickelodeon. We had Sesame Street in the 70s, they have Bubble Guppies in 2012.

Lauren actually had a birthday cake for her party made by another very talented baker mum. It was a gorgeous 2-tier Bubble Guppies cake (unfortunately I don't have any pictures) but I had the pleasure of making a similar theme cake for her school party ; )

I decided to make one of the Bubble Guppies characters that wasn't on her party cake - Mr Grouper!

I used tracing paper to capture the shape for the fondant cut-out that was going on the cake. It was easy enough... Mr Grouper sure was good fun to make.

Mr Grouper on tracing paper

Actualising Mr Grouper with fondant

Happy Birthday Lauren

I made little bubbles, seashells, starfishes, and swaying sea plants to embellish the sides of the cake. That blue on the fondant is one of my most favourite colours. Inside is a moist chocolate cake made with Valrhona cocoa and a rich chocolate ganache filling.

I'll gladly make this cake again ; )