Belle and Boo Rainbow Ombre Birthday Cake

As mentioned previously on my blog, we are huge fans of Belle and Boo and Mandy Sutcliffe’s stunning illustrations. For the past two years, I have made a Belle and Boo themed birthday cake, this year, my little girl asked for… the same!

As an ‘outdoor girl’ and with a ‘Woodland Explorer’ theme to her birthday party this year, I set about searching for a Belle and Boo illustration that would work well. I found one of Mandy Sutcliffe’s illustrations called ‘Cloud Gazing’ and set about crafting Belle and Boo out of Renshaw sugar paste. The early stages of modelling the characters are always VERY fiddly and VERY frustrating, because as the modelling hardens, it all gets a bit sticky and the finish isn’t as smooth as I would like, so what I tend to do is do a rough model, with the colours each element needs to be, leave it and then finish off over the course of a few days… I didn’t get around to making a kite sadly, however I planned on making the kite string and bows out of thread and tiny bits of fabric… maybe next year?!

The cake this year, I decided to try my hand at a different kind of icing, having used buttercream and covered with ready roll sugarpaste in previous years, I decided this year to continue to push my baking, and create a stacked vanilla sponge with buttercream icing.

I decided to try an ombre style cake; to do this, I had to make masses of buttercream, I then assembled and stacked the cake, then iced all over to create a ‘crumb layer’ which then sat in the fridge to chill for a few hours. As the crumb layer firmed up in fridge, I went to work on the coloured icing.

For each colour, I added an absolutely minuscule amount of Wilton food colouring to each to create pastel colours of the rainbow. I then placed my stacked cake onto my spinning cake stand and piped all the different colours in layers and then set about gently smoothing to create a ‘perfect’ finish.

I did, have to change the colours of the rainbow around, as I wanted Belle and Boo to end up on green grass, so I think the finish might have been a lot more subtle if it had blended just as a rainbow did… I am and was, however, still pretty pleased with the result.

I added lots of sprinkles to the cake and piped the remaining green buttercream around the top layer and the base of the cake to create some grass-like texture. With the important addition of a candle, this year a ‘4’ in lovely glitter, and finished with a really beautiful bespoke felt cake topper by Beautifully Boho.

For my daughter’s birthday party, I picked up some beautifully iced cupcakes from Cocolicious, which is a local place myself and my daughter love, each one had a rainbow piped onto them and these were given out to the children at the party, so that we could save the main cake for the family party the next day.