What to do for a 21 year old male.....

My oldest boy just turned 21. What to do for a fun, atypical male birthday cake. Once again, Debbie Brown came to my rescue! I just love her cakes and her instructions are so easy to follow!

What did I do - why the 21 bum salute! Debbie Brown is from England, for those who don't know. In England, they refer to the tushie, bottom, etc. as a bum. With her excellent instructions my son Geoff and I made 21 bums and designed underwear for each of them. This is the final product:


Bryan requested a strawberry chocolate marble cake - the easy part. As you know, I still have trouble with that darn fondant! The bottom two layers went on pretty well - for a change - but I still had puckers on that top layer. This is the better side, hence it is the front! LOL - its a work in progress - but when I compare it to my first fondant cakes, there is an improvement! I promise!

Anyway - back to the bums. These are basically fondant blobs that are rounded and then covered in fashionable underwear. Geoff and I spent the better part of a night making the underwear and trying really, really hard not to do the same designs. Things I never thought I would hear myself say - "Make sure the underwear is down low enough that you can see the bum crack"! Yikes! My favorite - the sexy little thong with the heart....

The Web Slinger!

One of my co-workers wanted a birthday cake for her grandson's 5th birthday. He really, really likes Spiderman. She really wanted a brownie ice cream cake. This is what we came up with. Square brownies with a Neapolitan ice cream filling in the middle. Chocolate buttercream was the icing of choice. I wanted to try and recreate the city that Spiderman stands guard over with the fondant panels and the web of course in the center would later be sporting a toy Spiderman for the birthday boy.

I used fondant impression mats that were brick and wood textured and impressed them onto the fondant. To make the dark fondant, I combined black and white fondant to make it the gray color. The lighter fondant was white that I later "spray painted" with a silver edible spray. That took A LOT of spray just to make it a darker color. Next time, I think I will try coloring the fondant itself. The spray mists all over the place and was pretty messy!

The web I made out of royal icing and made sure to leave the center for the action figure. It was tricky trying to frost, panel and construct this cake as it had to be kept frozen for the ice cream. I molded the ice cream in the same pans I baked the brownies in, that way I was able to keep everything the same size. It took some time to keep the panels attached to the sides of the cake but once in place and then frozen, it was no problem.

I do enjoy the brownie ice cream cakes - something I will do again! This design was a much better "super hero" design than the one I did for my nephew. Still a few design kinks to work out, but I think I'm getting better!

3-D cakes.... not so sure about them!

The office birthday cake for June was a special request. The girl who's birthday it was turned 21 this year. She requested a naked man cake.... Well - since it was going to the office, that wasn't really an option. Instead.... I ordered Debbie Brown's Naughty Cakes and found the Greek God cake. Good option - mostly naked man with bulging muscles. That could work!

Next time I will use a petal cake pan to do this cake. I can not carve cakes. I have difficulty getting them equal and properly proportionate! Not only that - cake crumbs EVERYWHERE!!! With this shape of the base cake, it was difficult to get the fondant to lay smoothly - fondant being a challenge for me anyway!

Making the figure was pretty easy overall. Debbie Brown has marvelous instructions that make it easy to do!

Overall, this cake did turn out pretty well - The birthday loved it (and yes, under the toga it was anatomically correct!) ;-)