A Curious Cake

This Curious George cake was oh so fun to make.  George and the balloons are made from modeling chocolate.  The bottom tier was layered vanilla and chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and middle tier vanilla cake and vanilla buttercream.  I couldn’t bring myself to buy fondant because would have been pretty expensive for cake this big so I made marshmallow fondant again. It tastes much better than traditional fondant but doesn’t look as smooth and doesn’t roll out as thin.  All in all, I had a good time “caking.”  I did learn some lessons (had to redo bottom tier, 4 more additional hours of baking ..boo, won’t say how it ended up in four pieces!)  The best part of this cake was that Ava was thrilled.  She couldn’t have curious george fly over her birthday party.  Okay sad, she totally has mentioned to me a few times “Mom, Curious George did NOT fly over my party!”  But at least he was on her cake!

And I have a new hobby that I like equally as much as caking, cookie decorating! And yes, that sentence merits an exclamation mark from my cheesy self . I found a template for a curious George mask online and was able to resize and print is to use as a template to cut the George shape.  The balloon cookies were super easy to make, I just thinned out the icing and flooded the cookie. The cookie dough and icing recipes are from karenscookies.net.  She also posts lots of tutorials on cookie decorating that I found super helpful.  I liked her dough recipe because it was strong enough to hold the cookie on the stick, didn’t rise too much when baked so the decorating surface was flat and it still tasted good too.

I set up a cookie decorating table for the party because I figured if I had such a great time decorating, the kids would like it too.