I’d be happy with this – decorated by 12 year old Zara!

My daughter is nearly twelve (how can that be?!) and is very creative: she will have a go at all kinds of crafts and loves to bake. She will spend hours making and decorating cookies or cupcakes:

Eden’s strawberry and heart cookies!

And these are the cupcakes she made me for my birthday last year:

Birthday cupcakes!

Last Easter she did a cake decorating morning in the holidays with a friend and they had a great time:

Easter bunny!

So when my friend Elaine asked if Eden was booked on any courses during the summer holiday because her daughter Zara was interested in doing some cake decorating, I thought about what we could do that they might enjoy.

Cupcakes are a great option as there are so many things you can do with them. Radhika from Sinsations – Cakes to Drool Over just made some beautiful jungle animal cupcakes with some friends and their daughters.

A few years ago, for her 9th birthday, Eden had a couple of friends for a sleepover and cupcake decorating. I made some cupcakes, coloured some buttercream, bought some sprinkles, sweets and chocolates for decorations and thanks to an earlier masterclass from my friend Gilly, was able to show them how to make a teddy bear face with sugarpaste. The rest they worked out for themselves:

Eden’s animal cupcakes!

I had thought the girls would decorate them and eat some that evening but they were so proud of them they wanted to keep them and take them home to show their parents and siblings before eating them.

This time I thought we could do some malteser cakes as there are various elements to them that I thought the girls might enjoy.

I have four 8″ sandwich tins but only one deep 6″ cake tin so I made two eight inch victoria sponges at the same time to save time and effort. An eight inch sponge cake will create a huge malteser cake so I then cut them down using the base of the 6 inch tin as a template to cut round. I had a plan for the extra sponge cake: blackcurrant trifle, using last year’s blackcurrants from the freezer which I had forgotten I still had. It was delicious!

Although both Eden and Zara have decorated cakes before, it always helps to be shown again! I explained to them how to fill the cake with buttercream, how to crumb coat the cake (that was particularly difficult because I had cut the cakes down and they did brilliantly), how to cover the cake with enough buttercream to get the maltesers to stick and how to put the maltesers on.

Then they chose their sprinkles and decorations and decided exactly how they were going to decorate the top. They used cappuccino stencils for some of their decorations and were very precise and careful to get exactly the look they wanted. Zara used freeze-dried raspberries for the bright red swirls and Eden was going for pastels with the pale pink and sage green sprinkles she used.

Then they made their malteser toppers, and added glitter. Each six inch cake used around 7 small packets of maltesers (37g each) so you can understand why I cut them down.

And best of all we got to have a cup of tea and a piece of Eden’s cake when they had finished!

Eden’s cake – ready for a nice cup of tea

I think the girls had a really good time: they applied themselves and did a far better job than I was actually expecting. I was really proud of them and enjoyed the morning at least as much as they did. Well done Eden and Zara!

Categories: Baking, Biscuits and Cookies, Cakes, Cupcakes, Lifestyle

Tags: baking, birthday, cake, cake decorating, cake decorating course, chocolate, decorating tips, kids, kids baking, kids' activities, maltesers, parties, things to do in the holidays