Snowflake Birthday Cake

By lovinghomemade on December 12, 2013 • ( 4 )

Snowflake Birthday cake

Last year my friend Leslie’s daughter Antonia had a swimming party for her birthday and I made her a dolphin cake. This year Antonia had an ice skating party so Leslie wanted a cake that was white and sparkly, like ice.

Snowflakes and glittery sparkles seem like a perfect match. Unfortunately taking pictures this time of year using natural light is quite challenging so the glitter dust doesn’t show up brilliantly, but the top of the cake is dusted with glitter powder aptly named “snowflake” and the writing dusted with silver powder.

The cake is a three layer 9″ sponge, sandwiched with vanilla buttercream. It had been quite a while since I last covered a cake in sugarpaste so I was a little worried I would have forgotten how. Once I started I remembered it wasn’t too difficult and realised how much I had missed designing and icing a cake with sugarpaste. The first step is covering the cake. It is amazing how great a cake can look simply iced and decorated with ribbon: one round the edge of the board, one round the base of the cake:

Glittery silver ribbons on white icing set the scene

This would be a great base for a Christmas cake also. I love the glittery base ribbon and was very disappointed not to find the same one in a wider version. Luckily I think the plain silver wide ribbon still works well.

Then it is just a question of building up the snowflake design. I wanted a snowflake on top and added the silver balls to give a bit of definition and glitz. I used silver dust on the white icing for the writing so that it would stand out from the white cake and tie in with the silver ribbon.

Silver dust for the writing, silver balls for the snowflake

Then it just needed a bit of height and some more snowflakes. I cut out the snowflakes for the side, gave them a dusting of glitter and let them harden so that they would stand up. I usually use water as a glue with sugarpaste but this time I used edible glue to stick them on the sides of the cake, just in case. You could also use royal icing.

Snowflakes round the side

On this cake I decided less was definitely more and stuck with a very simple design. The topper is made of just three plain snowflakes, some silver twirly bits and a glittery ribbon bow.