Portfolio: Tiki Hut Birthday Cake

My daughter's godsister Veronica turned 17 at the end of June, but her birthday party was held this past weekend. Her mom asked me to make Ronnie's cake and told me the theme was "beach" and to do whatever I wanted. I decided to make a beachy scene complete with palm trees and tiki hut. I am particularly proud of this cake, not because it's an ingenious idea, but because to date, it's my best execution yet! I made the palm trees out of fondant and the tiki hut is made from pretzel sticks and some random raffia I had laying in a craft box. The cake is a chocolate butter cake with standard American buttercream with some cream cheese added in.


I'd had two cakes due the weekend I made this and surprisingly I had no issues with this one (the other one was not so lucky). One technique I did try that was new was that I added two colors to the piping bag for the reverse shell border to create the two toned wave color. It came out FANTASTIC. The other thing I learned this weekend was that if you paint on fondant, you should mix alcohol with the fondant coloring. This revelation was one of those forehead smacking moments. I'd always used my Wilton gel colors and I feel a bit of a fool for not having tried using my Americolors instead. I won't be making that mistake again!

Anyhoo, the birthday girl loved the cake and so did all of her friends! Another success...[happy sigh].

Happy Caking,
Kelly