Recently some friends of ours had a beautiful little baby girl. What better way to welcome her than with a tasty toy box cake!
Rob, a painter and decorator by trade, wanted to try out his painting skills and make a wood-effect cake, so the choice was made – baby + wood + cake = one giant toy box…
The cake itself was a vanilla sponge with vanilla butter cream. I used a standard square tin, cut this in half for the main cake, and made a second, thinner cake to be sliced and stacked for the rim of the toy box.
With the basic shape of the cake made, we covered it in a layer of yellow fondant, and Rob got to work with his wood effect. Using normal food colouring, he layered up the colour to get the grained look, before adding a few dark lines to make the plank details.
Whilst Rob was hard at work, I made the toys and the blocks for the top. They are all made out of fondant, again simply coloured with food colouring. There is a great tutorial on making fondant teddy bears here, and I modified this ever so slightly for the rabbit.
For a personal touch I wanted to put the baby’s name on the cake, and what better way than pretty pastel building blocks. I used a couple of square edges to shape the fondant into cubes, before imprinting with a letter stencil, and drawing over with some glitter writing icing.
To put them on the cake I used some cocktail sticks to get them on different levels, and made sure to warn the recipients before they tucked in!
The finishing touch was a little chocolate fondant to spell out “TOYS” on the front of the box, a sprinkling of glitter later and we were all done!
I think Rob has decided as much as he likes the look (and taste!) of fondant, it’s definitely not the same to work with as walls! That might be the last I see of him in the kitchen for a while…
bakearama 