Would you like some tea?

October brings with it my mum's birthday and finally I got to try out a teapot cake, I'll tell you now that it definitely did not turn out how I wanted or expected, but it's all lessons learned. And mum was thrilled and that's the main thing.

My very good friend from Germany sent me a Wilton Ball cake pan for my birthday, and I finally got to use it. I knew as soon as I opened it the first cake I would make would be a teapot.

Mum's favourite cupcake flavour is Red Velvet so I decided to trial making it into a cake. The cake was successful, but what I didn't think about was the crumb coating, normally with Red Velvet you use a cream cheese frosting which is what I made, but it doesn't set like buttercream frosting does, even though I put in it the fridge for a couple of hours, so it was not the ideal base for the fondant and therefore it didn't come out nice and smooth. I also found it made it much easier to rip the fondant as it was still wet, so this cake definitely had a "back" side.

While I had the cake in the fridge trying to set it I worked on the flower decorations. This was the first time I had ever used a flower veiner and I was pretty happy with the outcome. What I found was  it works better if your fondant is rolled a little thicker than you would normally have for other flowers. I did 2 different colours and also 2 different sizes, while I was making them I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to use them and what pattern I was going to make but I knew I wanted flowers somewhere.

While the flowers were drying I worked on the spout and the handle for the teapot, I used Tylose powder so they would set, but I messed up my calculations and I used too much so it dried out very quickly and had some small cracking but nothing to major. I threaded in a few toothpicks into the fondant for stability and also to help attach them to the cake. I also made up a couple of other bits a pieces for the cake, but wasn't really sure if I would use them, I ended up using the flat crinkle cut circle for the teapot lid with the bottom creation (which I wasn't sure whether it would support it's own weight, but it did really well so I was very happy.)The only decoration I didn't use was the lace rim for the base of the teapot and that was mainly because of the rip in the fondant which I needed to cover up.

I tried to smooth out the cream cheese frosting the best I could with a hot spatula, but it didn't set and was actually quite wet, this ended up making the fondant rip. Next time I will definitely use buttercream frosting for the crumb coating.

The final result was quite bumpy, but my mum was really stoked and loved the cake. I used the wee flowers as  a border around the teapot which covered up the small rip in the fondant, because they were a little thicker they were heavier and were a little harder to attach to the cake but I used my glue recipe and just had to hold them on the cake for a wee bit longer than normal giving the glue time to adhere.

The proportions were a bit off for the handle and spout, I think I thought the ball would be a little smaller than it was, next time I might try the "American" way and sculpt the handle and spout from rice krispie treats and do them a bit bigger.

The best part of mum's birthday was when my two and a half  year old son sang happy birthday he gave it such a good try then helped mum blow out the candle. Then he kept singing in an attempt to get me to relight the candle so he could blow it out again, and yip it worked! I was enjoying him singing so much I re-lit it 2 or 3 more times.