Almost not worth mentioning...

In 2011 I baked my second cake (from scratch) for Diego's second birthday. Besides that fact that cakes made from scratch usually taste notably better, this was not my only reason for doing it. As I mentioned in my last post, I live in Alicante, Spain and in 2011, pre-packaged cakes were still nowhere to be found. Today this is not the case as you can buy them in many grocery stores, but since I started baking my cakes this way, I cannot bear to do it any other way now. 

As you will see from the picture, I was not very inspired this year, but the cake was very tasty, chocolate with chocolate frosting, and it turned out pretty enough. I brought the Winnie the Pooh candles back with me from my visit to the States that year, so at least there were two cute details, Tigger and Pooh!

How it all began...Iggle Piggle

Almost three years ago now, in October of 2010, I baked the first cake I can really remember. I am sure I have baked a cake or two in the past, but probably from a box, and obviously nothing very memorable.

This cake, however, was different. It was all from scratch and it was for my son's first birthday so, as you can imagine, I wanted to bake something really special. He was fascinated at the time by a program called "In The Night Garden" whose main characters are Upsy Daisy and Iggle Piggle, so I decided to make him an Iggle Piggle cake.

I live in Alicante, Spain and although nowadays, in 2013, I have access to just about any cake decorating item I could possibly need or desire, this was not the case back then. Cupcakes and cake decorating had not become all the rage yet, so my resources were quite limited and needless to say, I did the best I could with what I had to work with.

The cake ended up turning out pretty cute, and of course Diego loved it, but my critical eye could not keep from dwelling on the two main faults: my lack of knowledge of crumb coating, hence the little black crumbs of cake in the light blue buttercream frosting, and my lack of access to a solid red dye.

The cake was chocolate with a buttercream frosting, which I dyed with regular liquid food coloring. I made two rectangle cakes and cut the pieces to form Iggle Piggle with his blanket. It was the first time I was working with buttercream from scratch and I did not know much about it such as how to regulate it's consistency by sticking it in the refridgerator for a while when it gets too soft. Plus, thinking back on it now, I know I did not have any tools like a pastry bag or any pastry tips, so I am thinking that I just did the blue trim with a ziploc bag with a tiny hole cut out of one of the corners! So considering my lack of experience and expertise, I am still pretty satisfied with the results of this cake. After this experience, though, I was not in any rush to bake my next cake...