Created Creatively: Giant. Cupcake. SMASH!

Before this week, I had never heard of a 'Cake Smash' (though I've certainly experienced many times my children have smashed cakes unexpectedly)... But to make a cake for the sole purpose of asking a child to go nuts with it? Sounds like the perfect scene for a photo shoot!

This is exactly what this cake was made for. To be smashed and splattered everywhere by a toddler, being photographed the whole time...

Well, before it was smashed and smothered over clothes and walls and the carpet, it needed to be made! And I was privileged to be the one making it!

The theme was purple, pink and white... With butterflies.

I prepared a white chocolate giant patty case, the same way I did for the EOFY cupcake, and also this one, but the white chocolate one didn't work out as well as I had hoped! It set really thin (I think that by the time it had set, so much had drizzled down to the bottom to make a really thick bottom, but thin, flimsy sides), so, it cracked when I tried to separate it from the silicone base! Ohhh man! It was the night before the cake needed to be ready by the morning, and so I quickly asked my friend (who I was making it for) if she would be okay with the base not made out of chocolate, and made, perhaps, out of fondant. Thankfully, she was fine with that!

The fondant method was pretty simple. I turned the cupcake base upside down and covered it as I would any other cake. I kept a couple of centimetres around the edge so that I could fold it on top... With a finger, I slid up and down the waves in the side, so that the 'patty case' kept its shape:

I attached the top part of the cupcake, and started piping purple and pink roses around... It was about 3 roses later that I remembered that I needed an entire layer of buttercream icing on the cake first before I piped, so spread those roses around the top of the cake, and started again.

From the bottom, swirly, twirly;

One by one, pink and purply:

Once the roses were done, and the gaps were filled, I took some tasty little silver balls of sugar (aka cachous) and aimed them randomly at the cake - from all possible angles... I sprinkled, pegged, and pretended to be a famous giant basketball player, shooting them from the other side of the kitchen as if this cake was the hoop... You know, just to add a bit of glamour.

Enter my husband, who almost slides across the floor like Marv on green paint* because most of them missed, BUT, these were the ones that stuck:

Earlier, I'd made some light pink and purple butterflies that I pushed a stencil into to create pretty patterns on their wings, and thenfolded them over a bowl to set... They were placed ever so carefully onto the cake (covering the most dodgy parts, sshhh), and then with sugar glue, some were randomly glued to the base of the cupcake as well: