Kitty on a Ball of Yarn

There's a wonderful local shelter called MEOW, and our family recently started fostering kittens for them. Fostering kittens is, of course, about as much fun as you can have :-), but apart from the fun, MEOW does a lot of wonderful work with kitties, caring for them and helping place them with a forever family. All this costs money, and so when I heard they were holding their annual fundraising auction, I leapt at the chance to make one for the actual auction. Given they're all about kitties, this is what I delivered:

Unfortunately I don't seem to have taken more than this photo, though I thought there were others. If I find them, I'll add them in. Under the ball of yarn is a square base cake. The kitty is made of modeling chocolate and the rest of the decorations were marshmallow fondant. It was a little nerve-wracking, since the weather was warmer the fondant showed a tendency to melt... It worked out okay in the end, and was delivered safely. And credit should go to the original designer of the cake, UK-based Debbie Brown (I'm a huge fan, she creates amazing novelty cakes and has a few books you can check out if you're interested).

Rainbow Owl Cake.

The daughter of a friend turned two, and I was delighted when they asked me to make a cake for the celebration. Turns out Miss A is very interested in owls, and so an owl cake it was!


I admit, I just had so much fun doing this one! The cake was chocolate, the frosting buttercream and the owls were marshmallow fondant.

I used a leaf-shaped cutter for the body, shaped the head with the base of the cutter (cut out a semi-circle) and a smaller leaf-shaped cutter for the wings. I used the top of a decorators tip to shape the belly feathers.

Wizard's Cake

My son still loves magic and wizards, and so for his 9th birthday celebration he asked for a wizard's cake. He wanted a wooden desk/workbench with wizardly items scattered around, so, with plenty of input from him :-), this is what I came up with:

All the decorations are modeling chocolate. Here we have two potion bottles and a "two-finger ring" (he knew exactly how he wanted this to look, sketched it out for me and everything since I was kind of confused!). You can also see the handle of the wand:

And here we have a rat, a quill-and-inkwell and a spell-book open to an invisibility spell (and the tip of the wand):

 And the finally with the candles all lit:

The top of the workbench is a sheet of marshmallow fondant, scored and painted with food-coloring, and then brushed with cocoa powder to remove the shine.