Birthday Baking

Last weekend was my mom’s birthday. A tradition in our family is to make the person breakfast in bed, and to decorate the house with balloons and streamers the night before. However, my favourite birthday tradition is the fact that I get to make the birthday cake! 4 days a year, on the birthday’s of my family members, I go all out. The birthday cakes are planned months in advance. I try to make the cakes very different each time to bring a surprise factor into it. And what’s most important: The person whose birthday it is does NOT, under ANY circumstances, get to see the cake before it’s time to cut it.

For my mother’s birthday this year, I decided to make a travel-themed cake. Traveling is my mom’s biggest passion, and the pandemic has been hard on her since she’s used to traveling every few months. So, I wanted to try and portray her dream of travelling the world in her birthday cake. I decided to do a world map cake, and then to add travel-themed cake pops on it as well.

The first step was to bake the cake itself. I made a chocolate cake, and used whipped dark chocolate ganache in between the layers of the cake. Then, once the cake was baked, I started the decorations, the most fun part in my opinion! I used a blue buttercream frosting to coat the cake, and then cut out the shapes of the continents on green fondant. After that, I made and airplane and suitcase cake pop, and assembled all the pieces onto the frosted cake. Finally, I made a happy birthday sign out of some chocolate, and stuck it to wooden skewer sticks using more chocolate. It was an all day effort, and I was quite proud of the results! Here’s what the cake looked like at the end:

Learning Outcomes:

1. Identify your own strengths and develop areas for personal growth – I would say that baking and cooking are definitely strengths of mine, however, there’s always something to learn in the kitchen! While my cake did taste quite good, the decorations have a lot of room for improvement. Through practice, I can ensure smoother frosting, and prettier handwriting.