Little Olina turned 5 this year on 人日. She celebrated her birthday in school on Fri. Since her school does not allow us to bring any cake for celebration, I made some cuppies for her to give to her friends and teachers.
Knowing how slow I work, I started making the cuppies on Wed night so that I can decorate them on Thur, in time to bring to school on Fri morning. Well, that was at least my plan. Again, by Murphy's Law, it didn't ended as nicely as I wanted it to.
I was searching through my old piles of printed recipes that I've collected since years ago and saw this Mandarin Orange cake. The recipe uses canned Mandarin Oranges. But since this is the season where all of us have abundance of oranges, I decided to use fresh ones. By the time I finished peeling the required 2 cups of oranges, it's already over 11pm and I was dog-tired. I whipped up the ingredients and put the cuppies to bake.
The recipe didn't contain any oil (thought I read it wrongly). So the cuppies tasted like Huat Kweh (发糕). I decided not to use this batch of cuppies. My decision was a right one, as the cuppies turn rather wet the next day.
On Thur morning, I started baking my required cuppies using another new untested recipe among the same pile of collected notes. This time round I chose a Chocolate Pound Cake.
It was quite a good choice. The cake was quite fluffy. I always thought pound cake would be rather dense and compact.
I only started decorating the cuppies in the evening and didn't have time to do fanciful designs, just simple Disney characters.
It has been in my plan to do a Barbie Doll cake for Olina this year, after encouragement from
Rei. As I need to bring the cake to my inlaws' place on Sun, I thought I better do some planning before I started on the project. In fact, this was the first cake I ever did any planning. Those who've been reading my blog would know...lol... And I was glad I really sat down and think about it.
I didn't like the Wilton Wonder Mould as it makes the skirt very short and fat, which I thought look quite unnatural. So I use two of my medium mixing bowls and a 3" round pan to bake the cake. I also did a short 9" Lemon Pound cake as the base, as my 3 layers were not tall enough to hold the Barbie doll. I covered the base with purplish Marshmallow fondant and cut a small hole in the center to hold Barbie's legs. Pardon the poor pictures, they were taken at 4+am under my yellow dining light.
Shaping the cake
Putting Barbie into the cake
After that I went to bed as I was really too tired to carry on.
I only started decorating the cake around 3pm on Sun and finished the whole cake around 6:30pm. Hubby was rushing me as we were already late for our family dinner. If I had more time, I would very much love to add more decoration on the skirt.
Presenting to you, my first Barbie Doll cake.
I created a drape for her at the back
I tried to pay attention to the little details
Olina with her cake, she was extremely happy with it :)
Overall I had great fun doing this cake. All decorations were done using Marshmallow fondant, including the patterns on the skirt. Though it was not a perfect cake, it is the best cake I've decorated by far. Hopefully after this I can get more confident when dealing with fondant.
Mood: Elated
