Let her eat cake....or two! Grandma's 90th birthday

Grandmothers...They are always so calm, full of wisdom, gentleness, her heart is a bottomless pit of love and ever so generous with affection. Like a teddy bear, she attracts hugs and cuddles from her grandchildren. They are also the silent pillar of strength that holds the whole family together. Well, my grandmothers anyway...


My paternal grandma lived to be 98 years old and I remembered we celebrated her birthday that year, 11 years ago, in grandeur. In my culture, it is a blessing to the family if an elderly person especially the parents/grandparents lived to be that age. Come on, how many of us get to live that long and be proud of it? :-) When I learnt that my maternal grandma was celebrating her 90th birthday in February, I jumped at the opportunity to do something special for her (and to show off my new found skills ;-) Ha!). I decided to surprise her by baking her a cake...oh, let's make it two!


I got my sister, Felicia to be involved in this mini project and we decided that the bottom tier will be a 12" Chocolate Guinness cake and the upper tier will be a 10" Red Velvet cake. Yes, it was a huge cake as we thought we will be feeding 100 people at the party which turned out to be less. Well, more cakes for everyone?? :-p


We filled and crumb-coated the cakes with cream cheese frosting. For the outer frosting, I was intrigued and inspired by the Rose cake which was created by Amanda from iambaker (a pure genius!!) and my cousin, Tracy who managed to master that technique with much success. As this was my first time doing it, I have come to learn a few things. Firstly, cream cheese is a finicky icing especially in our weather. For this kind of piping especially on a huge cake, it is best to work in an air-conditioned environment. It is frustrating when the frosting keeps getting soft or runny while you are working hard at piping. Secondly, it helps to have a tilting turntable when you need to pipe the side of the cakes. I didn't have one and it was definitely a challenge for me to pipe the roses vertically. Thirdly, with cream cheese frosting, it has to be firm enough especially for piping. Most recipes call for high amount of icing sugar to maintain this consistency. It was indeed, and still is for me, a challenge to find the right amount of icing sugar reduction without compromising the consistency. Ya, it really is a tall order (and you still think baking is easy?) especially with our society which is super sensitive to sweetness nowadays.

I tinted the icing 2 shades of pink with Wilton Pink Gel color, i.e., darker pink for the bottom tier and lighter pink for the top tier.
On the hindsight, I think it would have looked better if the swirls were smaller at the sides. Well, I am still an amateur in all this... :-) Practice makes perfect, they always say! 











And for a more dramatic effect, I made butterflies from fondant and dusted them with pink and blue lustre dust. Don't they look pretty on the cake? :-)

My 'popo' LOVED the cake/cakes as she was pleasantly surprised by it. Even my relatives were surprised (amazed??) as they never knew I could bake. I think it still looked good for a first timer. But the best satisfaction I got from it was when my popo told me that she was so proud of us and she loved the cakes because they were made by her favourite grand-daughters (Awww...isn't that sweet? Ok, allow me some bragging rights here ;-))

Bob Hope once said, "You know you are getting old when your candles cost more than the cake!" As for me, birthdays are Nature's way of telling us to eat cake...or two!