Of Sloths and Star Wars

BIRTHDAY DREAMING: Because I'm hopelessly behind on this blog, I have yet to include our last two cake projects. They are quite different from one another!

Regular readers know one of our favorite non profits is Birthday Dreams, an organization that provides birthday parties complete with decorations, gifts and custom cakes for kiddos celebrating their birthday in a homeless shelter. 

We recently saw a post for an 18-year-old asking for a sloth-themed cake. Given that CJ and Annabelle are teens of or about that age, we are partial to fulfilling teenagers' requests, and we also tend to pick cakes we're afraid no one else will take on. So, we signed up for the sloth cake. 

We'd actually done a sloth cake once before, complete free-form on our parts. This time, I did the Google and found a great tutorial for a super cute sloth cake. 

We decided to give it a go!

It was actually a very straightforward process. Bake and stack the cake layers, add a little Rice Krispies treat (arms and legs in this case), craft claws from modeling chocolate, and make the facial features from fondant.

The trickiest part was covering the sloth in 'fur.' We used buttercream and a 'grass' icing tip but ... the icing bag kept exploding as we squeezed it hard to express the frosting fur. So frustrating!

We eventually got it done, however. The sign the sloth is holding was a graham cracker covered in fondant with letters cut from a sugar sheet. We were super happy with how the whole thing turned out.

More recently, we saw an ask from a soon to be 9-year-old boy. He wanted a Mandalorian cake. That's the first time we'd seen that on the Birthday Dreams' board and felt compelled to take that on, being the big Star Wars fans that we are.

We did the Google and saw cool Mandalorian-themed cakes featured on Sunday Sweets on the Cake Wrecks site (one of our favorite pages ever, by the way).

It was pretty straightforward.

THIS IS THE WAY ...

When we saw a request for a Mandalorian cake on the Birthday Dreams site, we just *had* to sign up.

CJ helped with the baking, The bottom tier was a 3-layer vanilla cake and buttercream icing, which Annabelle later airbrushed dark blue.

Annabelle sculpted Grogu ("Baby Yoda") from fondant and candy melt. Here's his head drying on the spaghetti pot.

The top tier of the cake was actually an enormous Rice Krispies treat covered in buttercream that Annabelle airbrushed to look like a sunset on Arvala-7 (the planet where the Mandalorian met 'Baby Yoda'). Here's the top tier pre-painting, and before Annabelle applied the sun and the Mandalorian.

We put the birthday boy's name on the cake board, in a Mandalorian font. It's not shown here for anonymity's sake. 

We were happy we had the perfect candles to top it with in our stockpile of cake decorations. 

We hope the 9 year old liked his custom cake.