Never A Dull Moment: It's My Birthday!

It was my 33rd birthday yesterday, so I baked myself a cake. Don't feel too sorry for me, I wanted to make my own cake. The hubby offered to make me a cake and I said "well, you could help me..."!

I wasn't exactly sure what the cake was going to be when I started out, but I wanted to create something that pulls from the fantastic colours and flavours of this most amazing season. I wanted to make something different, not just the regular chocolate or vanilla cake - but I didn't know what. So what do I do when I need inspiration? Google of course. I found a great pumpkin spice cake recipe with maple cream-cheese icing (original recipe here). Oh my gawd!!!!!! It was amazing. So freaking delicious.

To go with the fall deliciousness I decorated the cake in fall-coloured leaves. As a present to myself I had bought myself a neat cake decorating gadget, a mold to make the leaves and branches - it worked really well. I'm quite sure I could have come up with leaves on my own without the mold, but it would have taken a lot longer! Of course cake decorating around here never goes exactly as it is pictured in my head. I didn't love the colours of the fondant at first, I find it hard sometimes to colour the fondant just right. I wanted really deep colours, but adding too much food colouring makes the fondant sticky and impossible to work with. So I brushed a little bit of red food colour onto the red leaves after they were made to deepen the colour. I think it turned out quite nicely.

Starting to decorate. Notice I didn't do fondant over the whole cake, just for the detailed decorations. The icing was way too delicious to cover with fondant. And I wanted a slightly less polished look to this one.