We are fans of My Little Pony here… especially one of us in particular! So for her special day she really wanted a Pony cake. She actually had some ulterior motives… she needed a few more ponies to play with of course and she had her eye on Princess Celestia (and she slyly added in that having two ponies on her cake would be amazing). Usually I like to make all parts of the cake edible but I have to admit it was kinda nice just getting the ponies and setting them on top of the cake instead of spending all that time creating them.
We made our go-to easy marshmallow fondant for the rest of the cake. Marshmallow fondant is easy to make and work with but it is also time consuming and can be messy. This year, I got a little more organized about how I do these cakes. One or two days before the birthday I bake the cake. When the cake cools I level the tops by cutting off the domed parts with a long bread knife, then I wrap them in saran wrap and put them in the freezer until I’m ready for them. Usually during nap time the day before I make all the colors of the fondant I need, then in the evening after the kids go to bed I do a quick layer of regular old frosting and then I can get right to rolling out the fondant and decorating. If you’re in a pinch and need some time to work on the cake while the kids are awake, just make a little extra fondant and let them use it like edible play dough. They will love you for it. Marshmallow fondant is so easy to mold and manipulate. I usually don’t have the right cookie cutters for the designs we imagine, so I just use whatever I have on hand. For the flowers on this cake, we had circles that were just about the right size, cut 5 “pie” type slices in them, not all the way to the center of the circle and shaped the “slices” into petals with my fingers. We used water bottle caps for the clouds under the rainbow, and the colors of the rainbow are simple snakes, just like you used to make when you played with play-do oh so long ago! You really don’t need a lot of fancy tools to make it look right, although they probably help.
This cake certainly added to the “happy” part of my little sweetie’s birthday – she was thrilled!
I’m such a sucker for her giggles and smile 🙂
