Christmas time

Merry Christmas, I know I am a bit late, but holidays have been very busy and hubby is back to work tomorrow and I am finally catching up on things. Housework, well really only the washing, selfishly I have been more focus on getting up to date with blog and sorting out a crafting area for my scrapbooking, one must have craft in ones life or one would perish :)

This cake was a collaborated affair, This cake was make for my sons preschool end of the year concert and as I was making the cake hubby decided that he could help and this would be a good way for us to spend time together, to tell you the truth he got really into it and I think he really enjoyed himself. A good way to relax other than playing the Xbox.

I had bought 3 Topsy Turvy/ Mad hatter tins quite a while ago and hadn't used them before this, I had been searching Pinterest for Christmas cakes for a while and there were quite a few that had used these tins so I knew this is what I wanted to do. I had wanted to make a 3 tier cake but sadly after the first 2 cakes I ran out on ingredients so 2 tiers it was.

Because this was for going to be for kids I didn't want to make it overly sweet, especially in case my son got a piece because I am a meany mama and don't really let him have cake and if I do I normally scrap all the icing off, so I made a Butter Cake and did a thin layer of crumb coating.

Here is where my Mr. came in to save the day he covered the cakes with fondant, and did a really good job I think put me to shame, he decided on the colour scheme of a red bottom tier and green top tier with a layer of snow.

The base of the red was a little untidy so I rolled out some fondant sausages, again here would have been a great time to use a clay extruded I would have had lovely even sausages instead of what I did get, one in red and one in white slightly lopsided and then twisted them together to make a candy cane wrapping. Time to stack, actually quite hard to stack the topsy turvy cakes as you need to make sure you have the angles correct, and I think after finishing this cake to get the real topsy turvy effect you need to have more than 2 tiers, so Santa I know I have missed this Christmas but maybe next year you could bring me a couple more topsy turvy cake pans please in the next sizes, I promise I'll behave myself.

Now comes the fun, all the decorations and sculpting the figures this is where my husband shined and sort of took over, but I didn't mind he was having so much fun. I did try and make him watch the YouTube tutorials first, but his idea of watching was to press play not even look and do it his own way but I got to hand it to him they look great, but for those of you who do want to watch the videos Santa is here and the Reindeer is here just a wee note again because this cake is for children we used dry spaghetti pasta instead of toothpicks to attach the figures and as their wee skeletons. I did the tree and the snowman they were fairly simple, for the tree I made a conical shape and then using a pair of scissors I went down and around and cut little slits, and I cut out a wee star for the top. and for the Snowman well I think you can guess that one. Well I hope so ;)

Then I, with nothing else left to do while Gary was busy sculpting, made some decorations for the Gluten free Cupcake Wreath I was also making to take to preschool and used one of the spare gingerbread men and a star for the side of the cake.

I am sure as you can imagine the cake went down like a pile of bricks and once I handed it over to the teachers at preschool I never saw it again, just the plate with a few crumbs.