Celebrate with a theme cake

Published 6:09 pm Monday, June 1, 2009

By Parenting Press

Celebrating with a sleepover or a pool party? With a boat trip or a jaunt to the zoo? Of course you’ll want refreshments that complement your theme!

The Parenting Press expert on theme cakes is Eileen Kennedy-Moore, author of What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention (Without Hitting Your Sister), clinical psychologist, and oh, yes — mother of four.

For a slumber party, Kennedy-Moore made a miniature cake for each guest using small loaf pans. Besides the basic frosting, she used marzipan to mold heads — complete with appropriately colored hair — for each bed, and then added brightly colored frosting for the quilts or bedspreads. You could also use skin-colored gumballs for heads and add hair with frosting or licorice strings.

Rather have a pool party? On a sheet cake, outline a pool with pebble rock candy for the paving and shrubbery cut from flattened gum drops. Add paper parasols, blue frosting water and a sugar wafer diving board. For swimmers, use candy or marzipan to create the heads and arms that show above the water. For inner tubes, what’s better than Life Savers?

You could kick off a boat trip with a dock surfaced with sugar wafers; add a railing made with Tootsie Roll “posts” and licorice stick cross-pieces, and make sure there are lots of candy fish swimming in the frosting sea below. The rock candy pebbles will make a good seawall, and you can create “sand” with colored sugar.

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