birthday cake Archives - Authentic Simplicity

I love making fun birthday cakes for The Boys - I actually really look forward to it from one birthday to the next! The problem is trying to balance cost, nutrition, and simplicity - those three things don’t always meet together and play nicely when it comes to cakes and decorative frostings! Fondant, in particular, seems to be a matter of expense, difficulty, and chemical-laden ingredients, yet it can turn out some of the cutest and most gorgeously decorated cakes.

However, for my Certain Little Someone’s fifth - yes, fifth! - birthday cake, I happened upon an amazing recipe for fondant that contained absolutely no chemical or processed ingredients. What’s more, all the ingredients were something I had in my cupboard already, and it was just as easy - or seemed to be - as any other fondant recipe out there.

A Healthy Fondant Recipe that’s Easy?

Here’s how I stumbled across this gem of a recipe:

My Certain Little Someone wanted Mario cupcakes for his birthday (which he later switched to Angry Birds). When I was browsing Pinterest for ideas, most of the ones he liked involved fondant, which I had never used before.
I took a gander at the ingredient list on the label of store-bought fondant. My eyebrows rose so high they practically rocketed off my forehead, and I hastily put the container back on the shelf and said, “No way!”.
I found a healthy-ish recipe for marshmallow fondant, but when I priced the ingredients…. well, once again my eyebrows got a little too high and I reluctantly admitted that was not do-able. Those “healthy” marshmallows cost $4 a bag, and you need two for the recipe! Not to mention the cost of the healthier sugar/powdered sugar.
I started researching alternative fondant recipes - my goodness, there are a lot of different ways to make fondant! Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure. There was the original true recipe for fondant, which involved candy thermometers and boiling sugar water, which I decided against (way too complicated, plus I don’t have a candy thermometer). There were also a lot of recipes that called for strange ingredients I don’t keep on hand and didn’t really want to invest in anyway.
Then there were a whole variety of powdered-sugar based recipes, most of which involved corn syrup. I wondered if honey could replace the corn syrup (because that’s what I usually sub when corn syrup is called for in a recipe and it usually works well), but I didn’t want to risk it because I didn’t have the time to deal with it. I searched specifically for “honey fondant” wondering if someone else had tried it and if it worked.
Well, whaddya know?! I found a whole bunch of recipes for something that beekeepers feed their bees during the winter (no, thank you, I don’t have any bees) instead of more fondant frosting recipes… but there was ONE little precious gem of a recipe buried in all of that honey-bee stuff: Honey Fondant.

I made it pretty much as written, except that I had to add significantly more powdered sugar than I was expecting. Like, I mean, significantly, she says with significance. I honestly don’t know how much powdered sugar ended up in this batch of fondant, but let me tell you it is way more than I have ever put in any one recipe any other time in my life.

So I decided that when it comes to fondant, your choice pretty much boils down to this:

chemicals

sugar.

Lots and lots of sugar.

I’m glad I want with the sugar option because at least it’s something your body recognizes and knows what to do with. The chemicals are just scary, frankly - at least sugar is a known danger!

I haven’t made any other kind of fondant so I have nothing with which to compare it, but this seemed to be just as simple as any of the other recipes out there, and definitely simpler than the boiling sugar version. As long as you understand you might have to use a metric ton of powdered sugar, you’ll be OK.

Recipe: Healthy (ish) Honey Fondant

Ingredients

2 packets gelatin
12 T. cold water
2 T. butter or vegan margarine
4 T. honey
2-4 lbs. powdered sugar

Instructions

Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a medium-sized glass bowl. Place the bowl on top of a pot of boiling water (to create a double boiler), and whisk until the gelatin dissolves. Remove from heat.
Stir in the butter and honey, and whisk until smooth.
Pour 2 pounds of powdered sugar into a very large bowl, and make a well in the middle of it. Pour the honey mixture into the well, and then stir it into the powdered sugar.
Stir until you have a dough the consistency of bread dough, adding powdered sugar as necessary.
Sprinkle powdered sugar on a clean countertop, and place the fondant on top. Knead, adding powdered sugar as necessary, until you have a smooth round ball of fondant.
Work in food coloring as desired, kneading and adding powdered sugar when necessary.

A few ingredient notes:

The original recipe called for margarine - I would have used butter except that my Certain Little Someone is allergic to it. I considered using palm shortening but I wasn’t sure if that was a good sub or not (probably would be fine), so I opted to stick with the original recipe and use my Certain Little Someone’s “butter”, which is actually a coconut-based all-natural butter-like spread. I think either butter or palm shortening or some other similar margarine would work. Just don’t use the nasty chemical margarine.
The next time I make this, I’ll probably try starting with less liquid, maybe even half as much as is indicated here.
I made my own powdered sugar by processing raw sugar in my Vitamix. I wanted it to be pretty fine, or I would have gone with powdered sucanat or even coconut sugar. Either of those would probably work, but with the quantity used, it would get expensive fast.
The original recipe called for 800g of powdered sugar, which is just under 2 lbs. I’d definitely consider that a starting point! You’ll probably use more like 4 pounds, maybe even more, unless you adjust the liquid (if you do adjust the liquid, let me know how that goes!).

So my Certain Little Someone is turning one tomorrow, can you believe it?! He was born on a Friday last year (obviously) so all day today I have been remembering the labor and delivery… and believe it or not, the memories are quite pleasant! What a day that was!

So you know I like things to be quick and easy, cheap and healthy, right? So how exactly does one accomplish a “QECH” birthday? That’s easy: one doesn’t!!! A birthday is no time to skimp on time, effort, money (ok, as long as you don’t spend more than you have!)… or even sugar. Can you believe I said that? To be honest, I’m a little shocked myself at how much sugar is in this cake, but I am repeating to myself over and over, “It’s for his birthday, It’s for his birthday. And it’s his FIRST birthday. He won’t eat like this every day.” Please tell me my mantra is right!

Aside from the fact that I had no choice but to make his birthday cake, since any baker in town would look cross-eyed at me if I asked for a wheat-free, dairy-free, egg-free cake, I have always wanted to make my children’s birthday cakes because that’s what my mom did for us when we were little. Actually, I have a special status in my family: I was the very first one to have a non-homemade cake. Yup! Normally, my mom, frugal lady that she is, would make our birthday cakes herself and decorate them. But my third birthday happened to fall on the day after we moved across the country and for some reason my mom wasn’t really into baking and decorating a cake on that day. So, yes, I was the very first in my family to have a store-bought cake for my birthday, aren’t I special?!

Anyway, I digress… at some point, my mom stopped making fancy decorated cakes, but I love looking at the pictures of the cakes she made when we were little. I even remember her cake decorating kit, although by the time I was old enough to use it, she wasn’t really doing that anymore so I never learned.

Until recently! My friend does an awesome job of decorating cakes for birthdays, wedding and baby showers, so I asked her to give me a crash course in cake decorating. She graciously came over and helped me decorate a practice cake for my Certain Little Someone, and today I made the real thing on my own.

This cake is actually made of 3 cakes: 1 9×12, 1 8×8, and one car shaped cake on top. The rectangle and square form the “road” and are made with an “Eggless Chocolate Cake” recipe (one full and one half) I found in an old Fannie Farmer cookbook that I have. I picked it because it was a quick and easy recipe. Why aren’t you surprised?! The car cake is an allergy-friendly Wacky Cake. Wacky Cake is an awesome cake for food-allergic people because it has no dairy or egg in it. Depending on what you’re reading, it was developed either during the Depression or WWII when eggs and milk were scarce and/or expensive. So the only thing I had to substitute was the wheat flour, and thankfully, this recipe is so sturdy, it can handle a shake-up like that! Scroll down to the bottom to see the recipes.

The frosting is so terribly bad for you I can barely manage to speak about it, but for the sake of total openness and honesty, I will tell you that it is composed entirely of shortening, vanilla, lots and lots and lots of powdered sugar, and water. At least the shortening was non-hydrogenated. But I can’t use butter, and I was pretty sure the non-dairy margarines wouldn’t hold up well enough for a good strong buttercream frosting, so I went with the shortening. There. I told you. Whew!

Here you can see the cake in its entirety:

First I laid out the rectangular and square cakes and covered them with a crumb coat. (Should I tell you that I actually made another rectangular cake and it fell apart, so I was forced to make the square cake? Nah, I won’t tell you about that disaster.) For the sake of anyone who doesn’t know but wants to, a crumb coat is a thin layer of frosting that you allow to set so that you can then easily frost the cake without a layer of crumbs getting in the way. I haven’t tried it, but I have read that another option is to freeze the cake for a little while.

After the crumb coat was set, I used a knife to spread a portion of frosting colored with cocoa for the road. I went over that with a spatula to make it nice and smooth. At that point, I put the car cake (which I had on a separate cake board, both to make it easy to transfer but also to separate the allergy-free cake from the allergenic one) on top in the middle. I used a #103 tip to pipe the lines on the road, and a #233 tip to pipe the grass on the sides of the cake.

Once the road was done, I set to work on the car itself. Once again, I covered it with a crumb coat, then I added another layer of white on all the windows. Alternately, gray or black frosting could be used, but I went with the white because it was easier (surprised?).

I used a #3 tip to pipe an outline for the windows and doors. In retrospect, I probably should have used a bigger one, but it turned out OK. To make the numbers, I first outlined them in the crumb coat with a toothpick and then used the #3 tip to follow the outline and then fill it in. I used a #21 tip to pipe all the stars.

I cut two marshmallows in half, flattened them and painted them with yellow food coloring for the headlights. I attached chocolate cream cookies for the wheels and piped an extra layer of stars around them to make the wheel wells.

And that’s it! My super unhealthy cake! I can’t wait until my Certain Little Someone gets his hands on it and makes a big huge mess of it. Based on experience, I really don’t think he’s going to be the type to eat it daintily.

RECIPES:

Egg-Free, Dairy-Free, Wheat-Free Wacky Birthday Cake
1 cup rice flour
1 cup tapioca flour
2/3 cup arrowroot starch or corn starch
1/3 cup potato starch
2 tsp xantham gum
2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 cups water
1/2 cup plus 2 TBSP oil (I used corn; I have used coconut in the past)
2 TBSP vinegar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a 4-cup measuring cup mix the liquid ingredients and add them to the dry ingredients. Stir until thoroughly combined. Pour into a pan that has been well-greased and floured and bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes.

*Note: I learned a few tricks to help this cake cook evenly in the shaped pan. First of all, I put an upside down flower nail into the middle of the cake to help distribute the heat evenly. Then I raised the oven rack one notch and turn the oven back to 325. After it had baked for about 50 minutes, I covered it with foil so that the top would not burn.

Easy Egg-Free Chocolate Cake
1 2/3 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk (or milk soured with lemon juice or vinegar)
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl. Add the liquid ingredients and mix well. Bake in a greased and floured pan at 375 for 30 minutes. This recipe will make one thin 9×12 cake or one thick 8×8.

Butter-Free Cream-Free Buttercream Frosting
1/2 cup non-hydrogenated shortening
1 tsp vanilla
approx. 5 cups powdered sugar
4-8 TBSP of water

Beat the shortening and vanilla together until creamy (this won’t take long!). Alternate the powdered sugar and water until you achieve the right consistency. You’ll need a firm but not stiff consistency in order to decorate with the bag and tips.

Once the frosting is to the preferred consistency, add in your chosen color. Use gel food coloring rather than liquid to maintain the consistency, and follow the directions on the package for achieving the desired color.