Birthday Special: Baking Together - Little Pirates Cake! 一起来做生日蛋 糕

Ever since I started exploring fondant cake decoration 2 months ago, I got really fascinated and will try to start a tradition by baking a special designed cake for my little ones for every birthday, until they decide that they had enough or my idea run dry (hopefully not so soon :)

As we are celebrating Ethan's birthday tomorrow, I started baking the cake today. Just in case I flopped still have time to order a backup cake from nearby bakery. But I'm glad it turned out well... *relief*

Allow me to present to you... Our Little Pirates on Treasure Island Cake

My little captain helped me throughout the whole process without me asking. The moment he saw me took out the scale and flour out onto kitchen top, he took his kiddie-size whisker and offered to help. And I must say he did a good job. :)

All ingredients and tools for the cake decoration were nicely arranged before we began. I also got ready hand towels and kitchen tissues so can clean our hands easily. My little boy happily took my seat.

Ethan learnt to crack the eggs for the first time. Succeeded on 2nd try!

He then helped to add orange rinds into the batter and squeezed the orange too. Seemed like he really enjoyed helping in the kitchen.

We continued decorating the cake hours later, as we took a break for lunch and did some party grocery shopping. He offered to help with decorating as well, and chipped in a lot of ideas, eg to make a gold color treasure chest (which i filled up with lots of M&Ms later), made me a giant blue candy (loaded onto the ship) and made a green sea monster (but it was too ugly that I didn't add that onto the cake, oops..)


Ethan was busy rolling the fondant and flattening it. I took this opportunity to teach him the color theory. Mix blue with yellow to get green; mix red wit green to get brown... He was so amazed and called it magic :)

Here's the cake again under the yellow lighting effect. Honestly I quite like this cake, it may be simple but full of love.

This was my initial designs for the cake, supposed to be a 2 layer cakes but since I was short of self rising floor I had to make last minute change to the design to suit a single layer cake. The little pirates candles and little decorative trees I bought few months back came in just handy. :)

Anyway, to cut the story short, we both had fun baking and decorating the cake together while baby Claire watched on in her high chair next to us or playing with her toys on the floor. At the same time, I managed to save a few hundred bucks on buying a store make fondant decorated cake. So I am definitely going to continue baking!

Next I shall post about the party decoration for my Little Captain's big day, so do stay tuned.

I had my first birthday party only when I was 18, I just wish with a little effort, my little ones will have great memories of their childhood and of course, birthdays. :)


Copyrights © Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones, 2012 - present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any materials/photos within this website without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Making Bread Sculptures

Happy Bear Family

Ethan and I had a good 1 hour fun making bread sculptures today. When I told him I'm going to make some Playdoh bread today, he excitedly pull out his apron from the drawer and offered to help. So he happily helped me prepared the batter, rolled and beat the dough. Lastly we shaped the dough into some really cute looking sculptures and he kept saying, "mommy, this is fun!".

It's so easy that anyone can do this, this activity will be most suitable when you have a bunch of kids coming over for a party. It is just like making playdoh but only better - you can eat the end products :)

Ethan happy rolling using his kid size rolling pin, he was feeling really proud of himself. :)

Moulding a heart shape sculpture. We worked on 1 ball at a time.

Here's the ingredients you need:

Ingredient A:
2 teaspoons of salt
7 cups of flour
1/2 cup of vegetable oils

Ingredient B:
1 packet of instant yeast (11gm)
2 cups of warm water
5 table spoons of honey (add more for sweeter breads)

For decoration:
Chocolate chips
Edible Pearl balls
Raisins or dried raspberries

Note: the bread produced was rather hard, so next round I will make some adjustment by replacing 1 cup of water with fresh milk, increase to 6 spoons of honey and add an egg into ingredient A. Hopefully this will not make the dough too sticky to work on.


Here's how you do it. It takes only about 20 min to prepare and you can have hours of fun with the LOs.

1. Put all ingredient B in a bowl, let it stands for 5 minutes. You would see bubbles forming, that's the yeast in action.
2. Add all ingredient A in a mixer bowl. Mix well, then add into the ingredient B and form into dough.
3. Roll the dough into a ball, then knead it for about 10 minutes using rolling pin with your LOs. If it gets too sticky, just spread some flour onto the dough.
4. Break the dough into smaller portions (about 8 balls) and start making the sculptures with your LOs.
5. Prepare a baking tray with non stick baking sheet, put each sculpture on the tray with about 1" apart.
6. Preheat the oven to 375F or 170C. Let the sculpture rest for about 10 minutes before baking. Bake the bread in oven for about 15-20 minutes until they turn golden brown (the baking time depends on the size of your sculpture).

The original recipe is adopted from the book "Wonderplay, too".


Unlike normal bread or cookie dough, this batter is not sticky and is easy to work on. Below are some of the sculptures we made today, hope you have fun with your LOs too. ;)

Mickey Twins

Kittens, Bunny and Bear

Remaining dough were made into mini sausage rolls and raspberries rolls

The unbaked dough, about to enter the oven.

Copyrights © Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones, 2012 - present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any materials/photos  within this website without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.