Homemade birthday cakes

I don't claim to know how much a store-bought decorated cake costs as I have never bought one, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be much cheaper to make your own.

And most probably it will taste better and if you like, it could be better for you, too.

This year, my about-to-turn 5 year old requested a Batman ice cream cake.

Um, right.

That means I won't be using my best ever birthday cake cake recipe.

And I even resorted to the idea that I would source and buy the Batman decal for the top of said ice cream cake. Because my decorating skills......and time and patience....only stretch so far.

Except by the time I came to this realisation, it was Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

And I needed the cake for Monday of course.

So, a trip to the grocery store to buy 2 x 2 litre tubs of ice cream, a rummage through the cupboards to unearth some marshmallows (expired but hey, they worked) and the appropriate colours, hubby on the net finding the Batman insignia and wah lah!

I was ready to cake it up.

My idea was to squash the ice cream into the correct sized spring form tin....that's the circle tin with the removable base, and make some marshmallow fondant with which to decorate the top.

And, it worked, see?

The marshmallow fondant recipe is here.

I used yellow colour and tumeric for the yellow and I mixed cocoa and black colour for the black. Although to get it really black in a short space of time (it was nearly 10pm Sunday night) I painted black food colour directly on it.

Now, I'm not big on my kids eating food colouring, or marshmallows for that matter, but I was 99.99% sure they would not want to eat this topping.

It certainly tastes ok but it's just not their thing, so I was happy enough adding as much colour as I needed.

Phew, another birthday cake success.

Note to self: be more organised, remember your 1st post of 2010!!