Chinese New Year Cake

So traditionally, over Chinese New Year, people visit their relatives and friends to give new  years greetings, exchange oranges and get lucky red packets (well, for the kids anyway) cuz married people have to give red packets! Anyway, I didn't get to do much visiting this year so I was looking forward to going to our family friends' home for lunch and a swim play date. Along with a pair of oranges, I brought a simply decorated CNY cake over. 

Chinese New Year cake

After a hearty lunch of oven-roasted chicken with all the trimmings, we continued snacking on Chinese New Year goodies like pineapple tarts, bak kwa (BBQ pork jerky), chips. Haaa, no this isn't a post on eating. But, even as full as we were from lunch and all that snacking, we still had room for cake and ice cream at tea time! 

lucky red packets

I brought over a light 3 layer vanilla butter cake filled and frosted with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. I spontaneously tried out a new style of border piping that looks like a rope, using a small star tip. Not really sure why I chose to do that, but it turned out ok. To decorate the cake, I made a couple of Chinese golden ingots and a pair of lucky red packets out of fondant. I used an gold edible ink marker to draw on the Chinese character for "spring" on the red packets. My friend's mum was very interested in the cake toppers! She loves her cake but she hasn't quite seen a cake with these types of decorations before.  

Happy Year of the Goat. Now, on to more eating!