iPhone / iPad Devils

October is the birth month of two of my very close family members: my father and my husband's big brother. The challenge is that their birthdays are very close to each other, say 2 days. Thus, if I set up 2 separated cake projects, there wouldn't be adequate time to bake & decorate both cakes properly. So let's combine them into one then!

I {HEART} decorating cakes. So, for birthday cakes, I always try as much as possible to customize them according to the birthday persons.

Good that these two persons, in spite of all their differences, clearly have one thing in common: IT savvy. The picture of amazing, cute little iPhone cupcakes I've come across years ago then popped up in my head. At that time I could even barely bake. Now as I'm learning cake decoration, I'll give it a shot.

As usual, I started out making sugar plates. You might notice that there're many plates than needed. Because it takes time to dry sugar plates, spares needed to be prepared at the first place. You don't want to end up having 11 usable plates for 12 cupcakes 2 hours before the delivery. Once they were completely dry and harden, I decorated each one with sugarpaste and royal icing.

How colorful they are!

For the cake, I baked Nutella devil's food cupcakes. Such a safe choice. Nutella and chocolate are hard to fail :)

I decided to serve it in the cupcake pan to mimic the iPad / iPhone actual case. In fact, that's because I didn't have time to make a proper background. Anyhow, it turned out perfect to me. Easier for the delivery also. Great!

Somehow, when serving, these cakes were apparently not practical for holding candles, or I'd have to put it through the sugar plates! No way. I wouldn't do it definitely. So I placed the candles on the sides instead. Wasn't it nice?

Though it took me so many hours to make that my palms hurt, it does worth it. Everyone were so excited with the decoration and enjoyed the cake, including my 2 year-old nephew :)

For the recipe, please see this post.

Angry Birds Ice Cream Cake

One of my cousin is 22 years younger than me. Yet we share one thing in common: the addiction to Angry Birds game. On his birthday this year I surprised him with an Angry-Birds-themed cake.

I started it out by making Angry Birds characters sugar models. They need time -- from hours to overnight -- to set, thus have to be done ahead. It took me 3 nights to finish the figurines. Phewwww!

For the cake, due to the hot weather of summertime, I decided to try making an ice cream cake instead of a baked one. It'd be a big challenge for me. Not only because it's my first ice cream cake, but yes the temperature of 35 C (104 F) degree here could make it much more harder.

One of the birthday boy's favorite ice cream flavor is cookie & cream. Good. The appearance of this flavor would well mimic the cross section of the ground as it appeared in the game. So I picked cookie & cream ice cream for the lower layer of the cake, then topped with green tea ice cream. The background of these little Angry Birds must be a field of grass to mimic the game. Moreover, green is my cousin's favorite color :)

Layers (from base to top of the cake) :
Oreo cookie crust + cookie & cream ice cream + green tea ice cream +
matcha buttercream

Because of the hot weather, filling the ice cream into the mold cake pan (I use a springform one) must be done quickly. Once each layer was filled and leveled, the cake must be frozen for at least 30 minutes to set.

However, the green tea ice cream melted too easily to be piped and hold its shape as grass on the cake surface. The grass then had to be made of buttercream instead. Since matcha is like espresso of green tea, I made matcha buttercream to enhance green tea scent of the cake.

Matcha buttercream

When the whole cake was completed, I wrapped it up with cling film and froze it overnight. Meanwhile I made some dark chocolate ganache for decorating the eyes of the sugar birds. I also kept some spare of the ganache to be used as 'glue' when putting these sugar models upon the cake.

The birthday boy requested to decorate the cake by himself. It was a bit awkward. As soon as the cake was brought out of the freezer, it started melting quickly. But finally he did it and was so excited about his cake.