Merry Christmas

Christmas is my absolute favourite time of the year! Ask anyone I know and they can tell you all about my passion for Christmas. My favourite day of the year is the 1st of December, to me this means after a long boring year it is finally time to decorate the house, with all the bells and whistles!

So what better for my first Christmas themed cake then a Christmas decoration I ask you. I had originally seen the idea on Pinterest here on page 19 and thought hey I could do that.

So onto Trade Me to find a Spherical cake pan to make the ball. I just got a cheapie but it worked fantastically. So it comes in 2 halves and 2 wee stands so they can sit on try to bake level.

Here is what it looks like.

I filled up the cake pans not quite to the top as I thought that the cake mixture would rise more than it did, unfortunately it didn't this meant that when I put the 2 halves together it was quite a symmetrical sphere. To "Glue" the 2 halves together I just used a layer of butter cream. Then crumb coated it and placed in the fridge for about an hour before adding the fondant. As you can see in the picture below of the cake crumb coated it's more oval and round but never mind.

I was really quite nervous about covering this cake in fondant as you have probably previously read I haven't quite mastered the skill, but with every cake I learn something new and improve. I was quite pleasantly surprised at how successful I was with covering this cake. Using corn flour this time to roll out fondant meant that it wasn't too dry so no rips or "Elephant Skin" and smoothing proved very easy with the spherical shape so no folds or bubbles. I smoothed out the fondant just to the base of the so it meant that it wouldn't roll of my cake board. I then just had to cut around the bottom to finish it.

To make the decoration hanger I just shaped some plain white fondant using some Tylose powder to ensure it would harden and to prevent the heavy hanger from falling off cake I used a small cut up cake pop stick, which I always have on hand for my figurines. Then using a mix of bronze powder and Cake Decorator's Fluid I painted the hanger to add a bit of sparkle.

To decorate my Bauble I used a snow flake outline cutter and then used a metal skewer to poke holes in the snow flakes. I tried to make different patterns on each one.

I also had some Wilton Snow Flake Sprinkles, which I got from The Cake Shop Pukekohe while i was up north visiting, I just chose to use the white to match my fondant cut outs.

To attach the fondant cut outs I used an edible glue which I made mixing Tylose Powder and a little bit of water into a paste and the for the sprinkles I used some left over butter cream.

Here is the finished result.

And the perfect place to take my cake you ask, I went to a  Christmas decoration craft night with some family was a lovely bunch of ladies and we were all too busy meeting and catching up that we didn't get around to making the decorations but we had a ball anyway and lots of yummy food to eat.