Cake Tour, part 4

I am actually not overwhelmingly proud of any of the following cakes; I think I hit my peak in 2005-2006 and have gone downhill from there. It's hard to come up with ideas for so many birthdays all year! So I don't think that the Cake Tour is going out on a high note but oh well, here are the rest!

Zoe & Lucy's 3rd birthday. They each had their own 6" ladybug (or 8", I don't remember for sure) and the guests each had their own cupcake. I made a lot of red & black & ladybuggy decorations; fun theme. These cakes & cupcakes are super easy to do; just cut off the naturally rounded top & cut it in half for the wings.

Noah's 7th birthday, last year. I regret that I didn't use something darker in color for the rocks/dirt (I think this was some kind of chocolate breakfast cereal) but other than that I loved this cake. The cake mold is the Wilton princess skirt mold; same as I used on that pink princess for my friend's daughter in 2005. For the spouting lava I melted sugar, dyed it red, (just like making hard candy) and drizzled it on a Silpat (one of my favorite inventions EVER!) and then just stuck the cooled pieces into the top of the volcano. The lava flowing down the sides is gel icing. It looked even better with yellow, orange, and red lit candles on top! But none of those pictures turned out as well.

I posted this picture in January after Zoe & Lucy's 4th birthday. I made 3 cakes since we were getting together with all of my family, and since the girls' individual round cakes were small; probably 6" rounds. They requested the flowers and butterflies, and the light pink & dark pink.

More flowers: for Molly's birthday this year the party was flower-themed: flower plates & cups, a flower pinata, these flower cupcakes, and the girls at the party all made flower hair clips. The flowers are just white chocolate, dyed with food coloring, put in candy molds. Easy peasy. The stems are sucker sticks that I painted with thinned-out food coloring. The leaves are white chocolate colored green that I smeared onto a Silpat and then cut into leaf shapes.

That's it! If you're really keeping track you'll realize that I skipped a few birthdays along the way - one year Noah had a race car cake that was unremarkable; a chocolate-frosted cake that had a toy racecar on top and a little checkered flag. The cake itself was a checkerboard cake but it turned out pretty funky looking. One year Noah had a store-bought Star Wars cake with Yoda on top, and one year Molly had a store-bought My Little Pony cake.

If you have any other questions about any of the cakes I've shown, let me know - I'm compiling a "cake questions answered" post, spilling all my secrets :) So, let me know! And, just for fun, I'll put up a "what's your favorite cake" poll on the sidebar sometime too. Thanks for all the positive comments; you guys are great!