Dinah in Wonderland birthday cake

It is Terence’s birthday tomorrow so we celebrated this weekend.

Yesterday we had a braai at home with my parents. I made bread rolls which I have been dying to do. They came out very well and, just in case your wondering, the bigger one was for me [grin!].

Today, we had the birthday cake. I have been making the peonie and poppy flowers for this cake for about a month. I also made 8 cats for the display.

I decided to name this cake: Dinah in Wonderland.

In case you didn’t know, Dinah is the cat in Alice in Wonderland which is my favourite children’s book and my favourite Disney movie.

Dinah is the tiny black cat on the chocolate cake, with her mother and siblings in the background. She is dreaming of a cat wonderland which is full of mulicoloured cats have a wonderful time playing among giant colourful flowers.

The small round cake is a rich chocolate cake iced with chocolate ganache. I used 75% cocoa chocolate for the ganache and my family loved it.

The rectangular cake is an orange cake and the icing is a vanilla custard butter cream.

The recipe for this delicious icing is as follows:

Ingredients

3 egg yolks

75 grams castor sugar

1/4 cup cold water

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

180 grams softened butter

Method

Dissolve the sugar in the water in a saucepan and bring to the boil on the stove. reduce the heat and gradually add the beaten egg yolks, beating the mixture all the time. The heat must be low our you will get scrambled eggs instead of egg custard.

In an electric mixture, beat the softened butter with the vanilla essence.

Beat the egg mixture into the butter mixture. It will be quite soft and runny. Put it in the refrigerator for 1 hour to harden.

Spread of your cake using a butter knife in the same way as you would spread butter icing.

This song from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland contributed to the design for my cake above: