Top Tips for Christmas Cakes with kids

My Top Tips for decorating cakes with Children!

I love making Christmas cakes and have done them for as long as I can remember. I used to make them with my Mum as a child and remember her making proper royal icing. Over the years I have spent hours making our cake look as beautiful as possible…. Then I had children and they want to decorate the cake. At first I was going to make a second cake for the Children – but this would a) be expensive and b) it always takes ages to eat it all and with two cakes we would be eating it until next Christmas!

So as I make a cake which is square the solution was to make 4 mini cakes – perfect! I still get to decorate one for Christmas day and the kids can decorate theirs without my constant inturuption!

As a side I have used the same recipe for 10 years now and it is always delicious! It is the Waitrose Christmas Cake with Drambuie-Soaked Fruits. #Waitrose

First Freya rolled out the marzipan – she is getting very handy with the rolling pin. I do want to get some wooden guides for the thicknes though – its on my to do list!

Once she had rolled the Mazipan and put it on the cake Freya trimmed it off. Top Tip: Turn the cake upside down when you marzipan it – the bottom of the cake is much flatter and gives a great smooth finish.

Next the icing. I have moved away from the Royal Icing my Mum used to use ready to roll icing – I love the smooth finish it gives you.

Freya wanted to write on her Cake – and she takes great care in her work. We had some little tubes of icing but it was very hard for Freya to write neatly. So, I decided too help with this part.

Top Tip: To control how much ended up on the cake (or in Seb’s case, in his tummy!) I poured some decorations onto a plate. Freya and Seb choose the gold and silver stars and silver balls this year.

Let the creation begin!

Seb was very proud of his work!

Freya spent over half an hour very carefully decorating her cake – I love her concentration at the moment!

We have ribbon on our shopping list to put round the edge of our cake – but wanted to get the post up while it is still relevent!

One more thing! When we finished the cakes Seb wanted to eat some. I explained that it was a Christmas cake so we eat them at Christmas. He thought a little… ‘Mine isn’t a Christmas cake, it’s a weekend cake so I can eat it now!’ Well with reasoning like that I couldn’t say no! So we all had a slice! Delicious!