Birthday Book Cake

This is a pretty special cake today – as such, I’ve indulged with a few more photos than usual, so I hope you’ll enjoy them – after all, isn’t cake all about indulgence?  (Wait, what am I talking about?  Cake is essential, not an indulgence.  Let’s all remember that.)  🙂

This cake is for the mom of one of my dearest friends, and mom herself is pretty dear to me too!  I actually lived with them for a few months while I was in school, and they took me in as one of their own.  I’ve always felt so welcomed and loved by their wonderful family, so I was happy to make this cake for them!

The birthday girl is an avid book lover, especially when those books are in her native Armenian language, so I wanted to reflect those loves in her birthday cake.  I even learned how to write “Happy Birthday” in Armenian!

All three cakes are chocolate, but each tier has a different flavour of buttercream.  The top is vanilla buttercream, the middle is strawberry buttercream, and the bottom is caramel buttercream (my new favourite – made with homemade caramel!).

If you’re concerned about the amount of food colour I had to use to get the books such bright colours, not to worry – the colour is actually painted on the outside.  The top and bottom books were covered in light blue fondant and the middle with a light brown, then I used thinned gel colour to paint them the desired colours.  The cake board uses the same technique – it’s just white fondant that I scored with a tool, then painted brown.  I was quite happy with how they turned out – I think the middle leather-look book is my favourite, but I liked the blue ones too – I think the top one looks like a linen cover!

For those who can’t read Armenian, this says “Happy 65th Birthday Dearest Arsho”.  I actually can’t read it either – I Googled it!  I confirmed the translation with my friend before writing and changed it to the proper dialect.  Everyone at the party was surprised that I could write in Armenian, though, so I guess I got it right!  🙂

The cake is actually bigger than it looks – each tier is a 9×13″ cake.  It took a lot of work, but it was fun and definitely worth it!  Here it is with a bouquet of flowers so you can see the scale:

Now, for the final picture, I’m actually including a picture of the cake after it was broken.  This isn’t something I would normally do, but this time I take it as a compliment – during the party, apparently someone thought it was an actual stack of books and tried to open the top one, smooshing the corner!  Ooops – but oh well, like I said, I thought it was pretty good that they actually thought they were real!  🙂  Now you can see the colour of the light blue fondant underneath, so there’s an extra advantage too – but FYI, if you ever get a book cake like this for a party, you might want to either hire someone to guard it, or put up a sign saying that it’s cake!  🙂

Well, I hope you all enjoyed this post – I certainly enjoyed making this cake!  🙂

If you want to see some other book cakes I’ve made, check out this Twilight Breaking Dawn cake and this one I made for celebrated Toronto author Terry Fallis (his first book, The Best Laid Plans, has been made into a mini series by CBC, too, so he’s extra famous now!  You rock, Terry!)