My First 'My Little Pony' Birthday Cake!

My granddaughter Natalee turned six years old on January 16th and requested a 'My Little Pony' birthday party and cake. So of course, I volunteered to make her one. Silly me! I'm not a professional cake decorator or baker so I had no idea what I was in for workwise!  

Now not knowing where to begin, I started searching for My Little Pony cake designs on the internet. While searching around I found the most adorable 'My Little Pony' themed cake and a wonderful tutorial on how to make it!  Cute little decorations and all!  The blog where I found my inspiration for this cake is called Make It & Love It and you can find her wonderful cake tutorial here. 

I loved everything about her cake but for the Gum Paste Rainbow, I wanted a somewhat different design.  So I decided to search YouTube for ideas. I also needed to find out how to make Gum Paste since store-bought is so darn expensive!  After a bit of searching,  I found the design I wanted to use along with a tutorial on how to make the Rainbow topper, Gum Paste, and Balloon Toppers!  

The YouTuber I discovered is a professional Sugar Artist and Cake Decorator named Laura E. Varela-Wong.  She and her husband Arnie run a cake business called Krazy Kool Cakes & Designs. You can check out some of her amazing Krazy Kool sugar and cake artwork here!

Laura from Krazy Kool Cakes also features great and informative tutorials on how to make the best Buttercream and get the perfect icing consistencies. She makes the cutest darn cake decorations too! I love how she takes you through each of her videos step-by-step!  So helpful!  She will even show you how to Dam and build your cake masterpiece.. Thanks Laura!

The Rainbow Topper shown above took me about 3 hours to make. It is tedious work but very rewarding when you see the end result. The Rainbow colored cakes I made a week ahead of time. Each cake was individually wrapped tightly in plastic wrap twice over and then popped into the freezer. Freezing the cakes turned out to be a major time saver! The morning before my granddaughter's party I let the cakes thaw on the counter for about an hour.  Then I leveled each cake before adding the Raspberry and Lemon Curd filling.  Next I crumb-coated the cake then popped it in the fridge for about an hour.  I then added a plastic dowel in the middle to hold the cake in place and to keep it from tilting.  Afterwards I iced the cake then popped it back into the fridge while I rolled out the lavender fondant.

For the Fondant, I decided to go with homemade Marshmallow instead of store bought Fondant.  The reason being it's cheaper to make and it taste soooo much better than the kind you buy.  You can also make this Fondant weeks ahead of time too!  Another major time saver!!  If your interested in making this homemade Fondant, you can find many recipes and tutorials online or you can just watch the same tutorial that I did on YouTube here.  A big thanks to Elise from My Cupcake Addiction for a wonderful and easy to follow tutorial!

Here's an up close pic with the cute little Fondant decorations added.  To make the cake decorations, I purchased and inexpensive but VERY handy Gum Paste/Fondant decorating kit here.  I also purchased silver sugar pearls and placed one pearl in the center of each flower.

Here is a pic of the cake all put together at my granddaughter's birthday party!  I wanted to add little rolled up Fondant balls in Rainbow colors at the base of the cake to hide the area where I cut away the Fondant but I wasn't able too.  Somehow during the process of building and icing the cake, I managed to push the cake over to one side of the turntable and I was left with little to no space to do so.  I tried to move the cake using a cake lifter but gave up quickly.  The cake was too heavy to lift and place on a cake board without causing damage or worse,  I decided to leave well enough alone.  Oh well, no little cute and colorful Fondant balls.  Maybe next time :)

The cutting of the cake!  I just love the look on my granddaughter's face when she see's the Rainbow cake layers for the first time. Nobody but my daughter-in-law and I knew about the Rainbow surprise inside the cake. We kept it a secret because we both wanted to see her reaction.  Neither one of us were disappointed :).

Here is a pic of the Rainbow cake layers.  Everyone at the birthday party loved the colorful cake layers, especially my granddaughter!  The smile on her face made the time, money, and effort I put into the cake well worth it and I also discovered that I really enjoying baking and decorating cakes.  I think I might just have a new and delicious hobby to pursue :)