Isaac's First Birthday Cake

As wedding traditions would have it, we have saved the middle and top layers of our beautiful three-tiered wedding cake, a present from Pili, one of my lovely adoptive mums in Gibraltar. They’ve been properly sealed for a year and stored in the freezer. We took out the top tier just after our first anniversary when we went to a friend’s party and the middle one survived three subsequent moves where it finally rested in our cold basement for the next few years waiting for a baby’s christening which we probably won’t get round to.

We took it out for Isaac’s first birthday instead and were pleased to discover that after over four years in storage, the fruitcake was still moist and edible (I googled and found out that some wedding cakes lasted longer than ours). I had to remove the marzipan of course and redecorate the cake, which was a perfect excuse to have a go at sugar craft, a not so cheap hobby it turned out to be. I have decided that it was going to be Isaac’s birthday tradition: an Instagram-worthy cake that shouts “Well done Yummy Mummy you’ve done it again!” (There’s a lot of irony in that in case you haven’t noticed).

It wasn’t as easy-peasy as I thought. The project took a week of late night after-baby’s-bedtime effort which involved watching plenty of YouTube tutorials on how to marzipan a fruit cake, cover it with sugar paste and create the perfect cake topper! I was very ambitious, planning a wildlife safari made from fondant icing inspired by the ones I’ve found in Pinterest. But alas, it needed more experience and time than what was on my hands. After I’ve perfected the elephant, the monkey wasn’t too difficult but the giraffe was a disaster so in the end I had to improvise with a cheeky monkey under a coconut tree. So there you go my labour of love, not bad for a first timer if I’m allowed to say so.


This was no cake to be smashed, which I have recently discovered as a now popular trend amongst yummy mummies when celebrating first birthdays. There wasn’t a big birthday bash to show it off to either as we didn’t feel duty bound enough to throw one (don’t worry we celebrated with a daytrip that the little one enjoyed). And instead of a happy-baby-pleased-with-mummy’s-labour-of-love photo shoot we only had a daddy-blowing-a-cake-while-baby-looks-on and had a bite later. But the left-over cake was a hit when I took it to work the Monday after and no one complained of food poisoning so it was still safe to eat. Next year I’ll try to do a proper safari cake topper, unless I decide I’m not too bothered about all the stress that comes with it after all and do the sensible thing, pick a ready-made cake, the little one won’t know the difference anyway!