Birthdays are a big deal in our family. I love getting the kids to choose a theme and a cake. I love it because it really reflects where their little personalities are at. This weekend our daughter turned 11, so this week I spent hours making her chosen birthday cake.
“A Rainbow Unicorn Cake,” Indrani says. “Sure!” I say.
Google Unicorn Cakes and you’ll see the cakes which were my inspiration. Aren’t they amazing? This photo is my version – kind of ‘nailed it’ really don’t you think? hahaha… I was so excited about what my vision for the cake was going to be, and how my preparation was going, that I did a Facebook Live on Thursday night sharing it. Oh, and saying I was going to share all about how I went about making it. So even though this is somewhat different to how I envisioned the cake, here’s the low down on how I went about making it. Read it, if only for the laughs of what I went through to pull off even presenting her with this version on a Rainbow Unicorn Cake!
Planning and Preparation Of The Cake
Living in a bus, with a small kitchen, with an oven with just one rack, and a small selection of cooking utensils, it was always going t be interesting to make this cake. But I planned it all out. I gave myself plenty of time. This was my plan:
Two weeks ago
- Ask Indrani what flavour she wanted – she chose my chocolate fudge cake (too easy, I can make this with my eyes closed!)
- Ask Indrani what sort of icing she wanted. Her Nanny Sue had just made a carrot cake with the most wicked looking thick cream cheese frosting. She only saw Nanny’s cake in a photo, but wanted that icing. This recipe from Texanerin Baking would be used.
- Buy ingredients for the cake – easy, grabbed the ingredients whilst in Kununurra.
- Buy all the little flourishes it would need to make the cake look like a unicorn. This included making a batch of Quirky Cooking’s homemade marshmallows. These were to be made into long strips for the unicorn mane. Grabbed the other flourishes from a discount store in Kununurra.
This week
All was going according to plan until… Friday – the night before Indrani’s birthday.
- Tuesday night – Bake the first cake. Wrap and freeze.
- Wednesday night – Bake the second cake. Wrap and freeze.
- Thursday night – Make natural food colouring and a batch of the frosting, in order to make the rainbow colours for the filling between the two cakes. See pics below. Recipe I followed was from Leites Culinaria. Also make the marshmallow for the mane.
- Friday night – Make the plain cream cheese frosting. Then assemble the cake so it’s all ready for Saturday. With all the planning and prep I’d done, assembly should be easy right? Wrong…
Assembly Of The Cake
If you could have seen the picture in my head of what I wanted Indrani’s cake to be, and how this cake ended, you would know they are miles apart. My hubby and I spent much of Friday night laughing hysterically about how this cake was like one of those ‘Nailed It Memes’. To be totally honest, I was only laughing because if I wasn’t laughing, I would have been crying.
To get some quick runs on the board for todays big tasks, I decided to make the plain cream cheese frosting first and pop it in the fridge until ready to cover the outside of the cake.
Next up was to actually start the assembly. Right from the start of assembling the cake (filling the two tiers, covering the whole cake in icing, then decorating it), it became very obvious that the choice of cream cheese frosting for this cake was not a good choice. In fact, I would go so far as to say,
DO NOT attempt this rainbow unicorn cake using cream cheese frosting as the icing – EVER!
So to the task of spreading on the natural colour fillings onto one of the cakes. I soon discovered the cream cheese filling did not agree with the 27 degrees it was in the bus (we’re in Katherine in NT at the moment and it’s still quite warm at night). The filling started to melt, and slide off the cake. The colours started to meld in together rather than being 4 distinctive natural layers. I popped the cake into the freezer in the hope it would harden up the filling a bit.
Whilst the filling was having some freezer time, I started to assemble the board and the stand for the cake. This was too easy and was looking just how I had envisioned. Israel made the unicorn horn and ears, telling me he was providing the flair for the cake.
After a while, I pulled the cake and filling out of the freezer and topped the cake so it now was a sandwich. The only problem was the weight of the top tier of the cake started flattening out the filling until it oozed out the middle and down the sides. Back to the freezer it went.
About 30 agonising minutes later, I decided to attempt to ice the outside of the cake with plain cheese frosting. OMG! What a disaster! The icing / frosting kept melting, the top tier kept sliding off, and a big chunk of the top tier broke off. I had to use more of that woeful frosting to try and fuse it all back together. This cake was driving me to the point of laughing madly – which stopped me from crying. By 11.15pm, I was still fighting with that damn cake, and was nowhere near being able to assemble it and make it look like a unicorn. I decided it was just time to leave that baby in it’s Leaning Tower of Pisa state and pop it in the freezer overnight. Time to try and sleep.
On the day of Indrani’s birthday, I got up at 4.30am to have another attempt at making the cake into something which resembled a rainbow unicorn. To my delight the cream cheese frosting had hardened up enough to allow me to use a warm knife to try and smooth the frosting out.
Finally assembly was possible. With some degree of good luck, I managed to get the cake off the plate and onto the cake stand I had made. I put on Israel’s flair – the horn and the ears – and guess what, it looked like a unicorn, well sort of. I added the eyes made out of licorice, stood back and it still looked like a unicorn. Two thumbs up. I added on the mane made from long strands of marshmallow. I stood back and discovered the unicorn now looked like it had an octopuses tentacles. I carefully took away the tentacles and applied some rainbow ribbon.
Standing back I surveyed my handy work and thought, well it’s not like what I had planned or expected. I wasn’t particularly happy with the way the cake looked, or the fact it had a distinct good side for display and the other side, the bad side, never to be seen. However,
I allowed myself to be happy in the knowledge I had given it my all. This cake was made with loads of love (and not even one glass of wine. Perhaps that’s what was missing?)
I had to go and place the cake in the fridge in the camp ground as our fridge in the bus was too little but this added to the mystery for the kids.
Kids See With Different Eyes
Despite how I felt about the differences between my vision of this cake and how it turned out, the response I got from our 6yo son when I showed it to him this morning gave me hope. He said “Mum, you’re amazing, Indrani’s going to love it.” Then I thought maybe, just maybe, this cake will do. And this response from Indrani when we unveiled it, made it all worthwhile.
The reality is our kids see with different eyes.
Our eyes are those of critics. We look through the eyes of disappointment due to reality being somewhat different to expectations. Kids on the other hand, they just look through the eyes of pure love.
Do I wish I had bought a cake? No bleep’n way. The reaction of both our kids is worth every single moment of time and grief this cake took.
Other Learnings
- Wooden Skewers can be inserted into cakes with tiers to help the tiers stay aligned (And to avoid tears… haha. – Israel.)
- This sort of cake best lends itself to a much stiffer icing rather than a frosting.
- Making Natural Food Colouring is really an exploration but I used this method by Leites Culinaria. Instead of using spirulina powder, I blitzed some baby spinach I had soaked in hot water. Then blitzed it with 2 tspns of water.
Share your birthday cake experiences
Have you made a birthday cake your particularly proud of or that drove you made? Do share. Let everyone know the struggle is real but worth it.