teddy bear cakes

Teddy bear cakes seemed like the perfect thing to do for my baby's birthday... and, since my mum-in-law stopped by and was equally excited about the idea, we decided to pool our efforts and make a few instead of buying a giant cake for the birthday festivities...

The nice thing was that D found these little teddy bear silicon moulds and bought about half a dozen of them so we didn't have to bake just one at a time. From there on, it was almost too much fun to stop us... and, even if we didn't quite know how the cakes would turn out, it was just a two-step process, how hard can that be, right?!

Step 1: bake as many teddy bear cakes as needed
Step 2: frost and decorate them, packing as much fun in the process as possible

For Step 1, any simple yellow cake recipe is good - we just looked one up - and got the cakes baked the previous night and allowed it to cool overnight. They turned out soft, fluffy and good.

For Step 2, it had to be chocolate frosting overall as we wanted to make brown bears; and then go crazy with powdered sugar, butter, milk and food coloring to make batches of colored frosting; find all the little cake decorations tucked away in cupboards and keep them handy; then, pick one cool teddy bear cake as the guinea pig before working on the "real" ones...

We almost had it down to assembly line perfection: first the chocolate frosting all over the bear, then, one of gets one color frosting and does the paws and nose; another does the almond sliver claws and cake decoration ears; then, start the second round of decoration, adding details like eyes and pads, the goal being: have as much fun as possible in the process.

And, since one of my little nieces is about 6 years old, I got her crafting food for the party as well and I think she had fun helping out: the little strawberry mice in the slideshow were made by her! I wanted black cake decoration for eyes, chocolate chip nose, and sliced almonds for ears, but, since I didn't plan ahead, we ended up with mutant mice sporting peanut ears and chocolate chip eyes :) The licorice lace tails were the most adorable part for me.

We couldn't help making one little flower cake (again a small silicon mould) specially for the birthday girl, frost it pink, and put her name on it. And since she can recognize the alphabets, if not her name, she liked it I think.

Some home-made vanilla ice cream complemented the cake. It is a basic ice cream, similar to fudgsicle pudding ice cream, except, this time we didn't use the pudding mix, just used regular wholesome ingredients.

All in all, it was a quiet, yet fun day. I am not a cake-baking aficionado with years of decorating experience. I just wanted to do something special for my baby and am glad I could do it this year, even if she doesn't quite understand it all...