Quick post before the month is over (and my 1st one of 2011)! My friends’ daughter celebrated her 6th birthday today and there was supposed to be a treehouse blessing as well. I pondered over this cake changing the design but knowing that I wanted to have the treehouse made of sugar cookies. So I thought of an ingenious idea to make the tree canopy a cake piece on top of a pillar, with the tree house underneath it, just like how it is at our friends’ house. Lo and behold, my idea wasn’t so original. I guess this has been done before (but sans the treehouse below). After consulting some professional bakers/cake decorators at a local store, they pretty much told me I needed PVC with a flange to screw into masonite to pull this off. Not wanting to make a trip to Home Depot, I stuck together cake dowels with hot glue, glued the pillar to cake board and duct-taped it to the cake board for stability. It seemed to work out rather well (don’t worry the duct tape was covered with aluminum foil). The rest, I just winged it by hot-gluing a plastic plate to the top to support the cake “tree canopy.” The cake turned out cute! I did miss out a few details (like railings) but I did include the pulley system on the side of the treehouse and the rope swing.
I pulled this off in one LONG day. Yesterday I went on a 3-mile run, did yoga afterward, visited Catholic Charities to support their baby shower, tended to my 6-year-old who developed a migraine and finally got around to working on this cake. So that’s why my grass work at the bottom is not so neat and my railings didn’t have enough time to harden. Ah, but all the work was worth was worth the smile and amazement on the birthday girl’s face. Happy 6th birthday, Kayla!