Cactus Cake

Happy Cinco de Mayo/birthday to me!

What better way to celebrate a Cinco de Mayo birthday than with a cactus cake? I've always thought cactuses (cacti?) are cool. I saw these cactus cakes all over the internet, so naturally I really wanted to make one. I saved it to make for my birthday cake. :)

The flower and cactus spikes need to be made ahead of time so the royal icing can dry. I made mine several weeks ahead of time because I needed to use up some royal icing that I had left from other projects, also because I was anxious to get a start on this cake.
I didn't really know how to make a proper cactus flower out of royal icing, so I just improvised and did more of a lily type flower. Although it has its flaws, it still looked good on the cactus.

The soil is crumbled cake from what I had to cut off to level the cake. I added some broken royal icing spikes to make it look more like potting soil. For the actual cactus I used a Wilton tip 32.

So far I have had a wonderful birthday. Almost as soon as I woke up my parents and sister came down the stairs singing happy birthday. They all gave me a present that I had been wanting for quite some time (the Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary performance at Royal Albert Hall on DVD :D). I have had happy birthday sung to me three different times by different groups of people and numerous birthday wishes. :) I definitely feel special.

Thanks everyone for all of the birthday wishes! Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Pig Cake

Funny story: I've had plans to make this cake for months. Finally this past weekend I started making all of the fondant pieces that needed to dry ahead of time. As I was making all the little piggy pieces I remembered a fetal pig dissection in biology was coming up. I finished putting the cake together today...the day I had the dissection. My family joked that there would be more cake for them after I did the pig dissection, but I came home and happily proved them wrong by eating a piece. The dissection was awesome, but I prefer this type of pig. :)

Look how happy he is! I've always loved pigs. For my 6th birthday I had a pig party. I had a whole bunch of friends over and we put on pig noses and played lots of games that my mom had planned.

My pig nose :)

There were snorting contests (where we had to snort with different emotions if I remember correctly), pebble pickin', and a game where we had to eat jello out of a bowl using only our faces...like a pig! My pig party is one of the birthday parties that I actually remember a lot about. Because, as you can see from the pictures, I had a lot of fun!
But back to the cake:

I saw pictures similar to this little guy floating around on the internet. I'm not sure of the original source, but if anybody knows I will be sure to give credit.
Mr. Pig was made in half of the Wilton sports ball pan. Everything else was marshmallow fondant, although I'm sure you could make his feet out of cake balls if you wanted to. He is in a chocolate pudding mud pit that I spread around the cake board. I gave him happy eyes because he really loves his mud. :)

That's all there is to it!

Ok Mr. Pig, we'll leave you to your mud now.