My sons 2nd Birthday cake

After making a few simple cakes I felt like I could take the next step and create a theme based cake.

My son loves animals and we regularly take him to the local farm to see the animals, so an animal themed cake seemed like the obvious answer.

After looking for inspiration on the web I finally found an idea from the Disney website and decided to make a farm yard with cupcake animals.

The base for the cake is a lemon Madeira cake and the animals are cupcakes using a basic recipe but instead of using the traditional butter cream frosting I decided to try something new, meringue frosting. It is basically an icing based frosting but instead of using butter I used egg whites. The mixture does take a lot of mixing and I think that I could have made the mixture thicker, but the end result was great as it gave a crisp clear white frosting that wasn't as sweet as butter cream icing, which I though was great for a kids cake.

The roof of the cake is Shreddies and the icing is a basic coloured sugar paste. For the animals I used mini marshmallows for the sheep and mixed desiccated coconut with the frosting and some yellow food colouring to make the chicken look fluffy. The rest is all sweets that I trimmed to look like ears, noses and mouths.

The look on my my sons face was priceless and everyone loved the cake. Now I have to think of his next birthday cake and how I can better it.