A big roar goes to....

Lion Cake

Unbelievable but true. A whole year has passed. The veggie baby is now a veggie toddler (although walking isn't quite on the horizon just yet).

To celebrate I made a cake. Our Monkey loves lions, so what better to bake than a lion cake?

Sketching a rough

I tried a couple of recipes since I didn't want to find out the night before the big day, that the recipe wasn't working. Because I had never used fondant, I had a play... Let's call it a sketch!

Easy Vanilla Cake

I finally decided on the "Easy Vanilla Cake" recipe found here on the BBC Good Food website. The cake tastes delicious and it nice and fuffy.

Ingredients are:
    •    250g pack unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
    •    250g golden caster sugar
    •    seeds scraped from 1 vanilla pod or 1 tsp vanilla paste
    •    5 large eggs, cracked into a jug
    •    85g plain flour
    •    100g full-fat Greek yogurt (I used Total)
    •    250g self-raising flour
    •    3 tbsp semi-skimmed milk

Fluffy dough

Method:

Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Grease a round, deep 20cm tin, then line the base and sides with non-stick baking paper.

Using electric beaters or a tabletop mixer, beat the butter, sugar, vanilla and ¼ tsp salt together until pale and fluffy, then pour in the eggs, one at a time, giving the mix a really good beating before adding the next. Add 1 tbsp of the plain flour if the mix starts to look slimy rather than fluffy. Beat in the yogurt.

Mix the flours; then, using a large metal spoon, fold them into the batter, followed by the milk. Spoon the mix into the tin and bake for about 35 minutes or until well risen and golden – a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean.

Everything went nice and smoothly, I even had the monkey help me put the flour into the mixture. Sadly once transferred into the tin, and lifting off to place into the oven, the bottom of the cheap cake tin came dislodged and plonked onto the floor. Very disappointing. So I had to start from scratch. The second attempt went smoothly without any disasters.

Decorating

Once the cake had cooled down it was time to decorate. Now, I do love making a cake, but decorating it hasn't yet been a big thing for me. Partially because I personally don't want to have a ton of sugar and extra calories in/on my cake. But since this is a 1st Birthday Cake I thought: let's go to town!

decorating the Lion Cake

Ready, set, go! I had drawn a little sketch on how I wanted it to look like, and so I started rolling out the sugar fondant.

Once the yellow and white pieces of fondant were in place, I added chocolate icing for the details of the mane, eyes and mouth area.

Looking more and more like a Lion Cake

Here the final Lion Cake in all its "glory". I suppose a real cake maker would laugh at my child-like cake decoration, but I am proud as punch. Rrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr.

1st birthday cake: Lion Cake

Happy 1st Birthday Veggie Baby!!