Crissa's Cake Corner!: Pink & Grey Elephant Cake, Cookies, Cake Pops & Cupcakes

Baby Dionne’s mummy and daddy wanted to celebrate her 1^st month with a pink and grey elephant-themed party! I really like this sweet colour combo and theme, especially for a baby girl! I had a similar theme for my youngest daughter’s 1^st birthday earlier this year. So, for Dionne’s party, I got to make cake pops, cookies, cupcakes & an elephant-topped cake! I threw in some meringue kisses as well to surprise Dionne’s mummy.

pink & grey elephant-themed dessert table*

For the cake pops, I went with a simple, but classy design of pink and white sugar covered cake pops, with a small fondant daisy flower accent, similar to these black and white cake pops. The cake pops are made of red velvet cake, crumbled and swirled with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. After forming them into balls and freezing them, they were dipped into melted white chocolate and rolled in glittering sanding sugar and left to dry. For a step-by-step on how to make cake pops, check out my cake pop basics page.

love the stripey straws on these pink & white cake pops

The cookies are vanilla sugar cookies, decorated with royal icing. I used royal icing mix, that’s made with meringue powder, instead of whipping up a batch of traditional royal icing using raw egg whites because there may be some guests that cannot eat raw egg whites. I used Americolor's Deep Pink and Wilton’s Black food gel to get the colours. The icing on the cookies was allowed to dry overnight in an airconditioned room, so that it would get nice and hard, and the cookies can be stacked. I’m not sure why pink splotches developed on the finished pink cookies. Didn’t happen to the grey ones!

pink & grey elephant cookies

And as another surprise, I made “letter” cookies, spelling out Dionne’s name, decorated in the same way as the elephant cookies. Bite-sized cuteness!

a lovely plate of elephants**

letter cookies**

The cupcakes are strawberry cupcakes, frosted with a generous swirl of two-toned vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream, embellished with fondant daisy flowers and pink sugar pearls.

strawberry cupcakes with two-tone frosting

To get the two-toned frosting, I thought of keeping everything "neat" by half-filling two piping bags, one with white frosting, and the other with pink, and then putting both bags in another bag, fitted with a 1M piping tip! This ensured that both colours came out evenly when piped, and made for consistent frosting for all 4 dozen cupcakes! One can even add in another colour or two to make an even more colourful frosting! Of course, if you want the colours in the swirls to be more random, by all means, just scoop the coloured frosting in a piping bag, squish it a little and then pipe away! It'll look great too.

half-filled piping bags

the trick to two-toned frosting

The cupcakes were packaged nicely in individual white boxes with handles, and tagged with a sweet, custom-made thank you note. They made really nice giveaways for the guests to take home.

cupcakes favours with customised gift tag

Remember the pink & grey marshmallow-surprise meringue kisses in my earlier post? Well, I kept those in an airtight container and brought them to the party, as a surprise! They look much nicer all dressed up in a nice glass jar with a grey ribbon to match.

striped meringue kisses with a marshmallow surprise

Now, onto the cake! Both cake tiers were rich and chocolatey Devil's Food Cake filled with whipped dark chocolate ganache, requested by Dionne's daddy. He remembers this flavour well, from the toilet paper roll cake that I made for Dionne's mummy's birthday!

fondant-covering, in progress

Covering both the 5" & 8" tiers was a breeze, using my new favourite fondant - Massa Ticino Tropic! As I've been raving about in my previous posts, this fondant is super soft, elastic and so easy to handle. It can be rolled really thin and man-handled onto the cake, and still, no tears or cracks or elephant skin! It costs about three times that of store-brand fondant, but it's worth every penny, considering that much less is used to cover a cake, and it saves me all the stress and grief from rolling and re-rolling because of all those ugly cracks and tears on cheaper brands of fondant!

classy pink & grey striped design (the wooden dowels are there to support the top tier)

But, every brand of fondant has its use. Because Massa Ticino is so soft and elastic, it doesn't really dry completely hard and probably would not be suitable for figurines. I used store brand fondant to make the cute elephant topper, as well as for the pink and grey stripes and bow on the bottom tier of the cake. It's my first time doing this design, with random stripes all around the cake, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to cut the stripes evenly. But, thanks to my new, handy dandy rolling fondant ribbon cutter, getting the ribbons a consistent width was a breeze.

sweet, elephant-topped pink & grey cake

To get the quilted pattern on the top tier, I cut a triangle out from the side of an empty cereal box, and used that as a guide to make lines by rolling a quilting tool on the longest edge of the cardboard triangle, all around the cake. Once you've got the diagonal lines all around the cake, flip the cardboard triangle around and draw lines going the opposite direction, and boom, you've got a quilted pattern. Of course, if you have a quilted pattern press, just use that to lightly indent the pattern onto the cake.

elephant sitting proudly atop the cake

cute elephant topper

All these pink and grey bakes went on a lovely dessert table, set up and styled by Lovewithdetails. I love the use of all different shades of pink, the dainty display plates and the handmade bunting with different patterns printed in pink and grey! The soft colours and cute details make this sweet table just perfect for a baby's 1st month party.