Cake Decorator Extraordinaire!

Well I know I promised you a picture of Alby's birthday cake, so here it is, although I have to admit it didn't turn out quite as we expected.  The idea was to buy some ready rolled white icing and to make a snowman cake, using some small tubes of coloured icing to decorate him.  Unfortunately I mis-read the packet of icing and when we got it home realised we only had half the amount we needed.  The prospect of another 50-mile mile round trip for another batch of icing was too much, so sadly the snowman idea was out the window and we had to try and think of something else.  Our towering pile of cake was reminiscent of a robot-shape so we went with that idea, covering him in grey buttercream frosting (made using a small amount of black food colouring) and adding some decoration at the end.  Unfortunately our pile of cake was slightly off balance so over the course of the evening our little robot buddy developed a rather pronounced tilt, so we thought we'd better get on with it and eat him up before he fell over completely.  Despite the difficulties he was lots of fun to make and absolutely delicious, and perhaps I'll have a go at a properly iced cake some other time... there's always Christmas after all!

We ended up with a fair amount of leftover sponge cake and then we remembered our friend Crafty Helen uses hers to make little truffles, so we nabbed her idea and made these mini christmas pudding truffles, which went down a treat with all Alby's birthday party guests.