*You will now find a picture of Laura in action at the end of this post*

It was my very special friend Laura's son Ben's first birthday this weekend and Laura wanted to create a very special cake for him. She camped at my house for the whole day and inbetween feeding toddlers and calming tears (Ben and Eloise's not our own...) we created this great cake.

The cake was a traditional birthday cake - vanilla sponge with buttercream and jam filling. We then covered the cake in coloured fondant and added brightly coloured presents the whole way around the bottom tier and B E N nursery blocks and yellow stars on the top tier. On the very top we placed a '1' candle circled by more stars. An iced green board and red ribbon finished the look. That summary makes it sound easy but we estimate we spent 10 hours working on this cake!

Laura was an excellent student and did most of the work herself. Her finest hour was hand carving the BEN letters freehand (and she didn't crack under the pressure despite my trash talk!)

Ben liked it so much he didn't even bother using his fingers - he just stuck his whole face into his slice! Happy birthday Ben!

Eloise's first birthday party was the perfect excuse to make a cake! I went for a two tiered pink theme with a striped bottom tier, sugarpaste flowers and a little sparkly fairy on top.

I added 2 dozen cupcakes to the display with co-ordinating decoration. I was dissapointed with the result of the gingham check cupcake cases as the mixture showed through a lot and obsured the pattern - i will not be using them again (They were from Hobbycraft)

The cake took far longer than expected resulting in a 3am finish but it looked great on the day and tasted good too!

Last week saw my husband's little sister turn 21. She asked for a fantasy cake and after looking at loads of designs we decided to go for our own star burst theme in red, white and black.

Because we didn't need a huge amount of cake, i used a dummy for the bottom tier which meant i could decorate well in advance. I created a raised tiered base by layering different coloured iced square boards at different angles. Each board had stars embossed into the icing.

The  tiers was then decorated with red, white and black fondant icing (Thanks Chris for mixing all the red for me!) in a variety of different patterned designs. The top 2 edible tiers were lemon flavoured sponge with buttercream filling.

A stylised icing 21 was added to the middle tier and icing stars cascaded from the wired topper and tumbled down the cake to the base.

Black ribbon edging to the boards and a fair amount of edible holographic glitter finished the look.

The party went off without a hitch and despite the cakes not actually being cut on the night, they were a big hit.