Character cakes revisited

I've been excitedly trying to work out which kind of cake to make for my daughter's 2nd Birthday. I  have to admit I do love a good character cake. I remember many happy hours spent with my Mum's 'Children's Party Cake Book' (by Cathy Mackinlay, circa 1987), just looking at the photos :D ... Oh and one instance where, without access to sugar paste, I attempted to ice the cake on p55 with peanut butter - which didn't go down well with my parents, who had no idea I'd even made a cake in the first place.

Anyway, it's all got me a bit nostalgic, finger painting, baking gingerbread men and themed birthday cakes were all desirable draws of Motherhood as far as I was concerned when I was a kid - so you can imagine how excited I was when my son's first birthday came along...

Iggle Piggle from 'In the Night Garden' was the hero of the moment during JJ's first year of life, so who else could I base a cake on. I'd planned out the shape, and even made a template to cut each limb out of a 9 by 9 cake tin. This was a learning curve about sugarpaste, buying plain white then colouring it with food dye was a slow and unrewarding process, but I learnt a lot (even if it was simply: do not use food colouring).

By JJ's second birthday, everything had to be Pixar Cars related (and still is a year and a half later), he even got a red race car shaped bed. I wish I'd known then how much of an obsession cars where going to be for him and I'd have invested in a car shaped tin, instead for this cake I layered two large square cakes and then carved the cake out of them (there was so much cut-off Mr S even made an additional 'mater' cake and iced it with butter cream). This time I bought pre-coloured red icing :)

Third Birthday, Josh was still equally cars obsessed and personally requested a 'Chick Hicks' cake (another Pixar/Disney cars character), this is probably my best cake to date, having perfected my 'car shaped' cake the year before.

My daughter's first birthday I set myself a bit of a challenge with this 'Waybuloo' De-Lei cake, when the big day came around I was feeling so under the weather with flu but managed to cobble together this cake for her. Can't wait for this year, its a Minnie Mouse theme and there are so many great ideas out there.