Ski Cake

Snow/ski themed celebration cake
Ok, in our home I both love baking, eating and creating individual celebration cakes. This one came after one of my sons first experience of skiing. Satisfyingly his name also begins with 'Z' so the ski tracks are also his initial.

Ok, well, I made a couple of firm madeira style cakes. They're great to sculpt with and very forgiving. With the cakes I sandwich a couple together with frosting and then cut away at them until I had a gentle slope. Covered this with more frosting and some ordinary white fondant icing.

Whilst the cake was cooking I'd made a batch of gingerbread cookies. Using a set of stamps cut out loads of different stars sizes and cooked them. When stacked hapharzardly they kinda look like a fir tree.

For the figure I just mucked about with some icing till I had a rough shape of a tween in a ski suit :) I then arranged him at the bottom of the slope showing he'd hada good time falling. Using the tiny bit of blue and red icing that I had left I mix them together, rolled out and using a knife cut out skis to fit my figure. I then placed them on the cake as if he'd fallen, (ie one has gone astray). Once I knew where my figure was I put in his ski tracks, as I said above, very cool that it married up with his name.

I sandwiched the cookies together with some piped green royal icing. I used a couple of muffins I had to hand as bushes. In truth they were a bit of an afterthought as the edges seemed a bit sparse.

To finish, I sprinked a bit of icing sugar everywhere using a sieve.. fresh snow! Yay!

I had intended to use the candles as slalom poles but it detracted from the ski tracks so I didn't bother :)