The staff at the local Cargill (manufacturer of animal feed and nutrition) celebrated their monthly birthdays (June-September) last Friday and I baked for them Chocolate & Orange Swirl and Lemon Poppyseed Cupcakes. The theme was animals that they produce feed for. That's as much as I could do for a product like that! 4 bags of animal feed and these animal cut-outs (as simple as they look,) took me the whole day! I didn't even get to cook dinner that day...sigh. 
Another current tween/teen pastime that's caught me unaware- Roller Disco. I mean, I know they're quite popular in the US of A but here? I know there's an ice-skating rink in the mall and I know there used to be a roller-skating rink somewhere downtown but that was like 20 years ago. I'm guessing they're revived roller-skating and incorporated the disco theme, supposedly you can roller-dance better to Funky Town and Saturday Night Fever than a Bieber song? Nevertheless, despite my ignorance, I think Roller-Disco would be cool. I can just visualise us 'oldies' revisiting roller skating, bobbing to songs we're more than familiar with, embarassing the hell out of our kids and muttering under our breath "please don't fall, please don't fall" while trying to 'do our thang'? Hmm...I think I'll stick to the rink-side. I've got brittle bones.
It's a 9-year old's birthday with a small party of 20. So, I baked a 9" Lemon Poppyseed Cake (finished weighing 2.1kg) for the girls and covered it in bright pink. Next, I made an LP (for the young ones- LP stands for long-playing microgrove record, no cassettes or CDs in the early 70s) for the top of the cake and attached a pole for the disco ball. No, we cannot NOT have a mirrored disco ball for a disco party! Because it's a small-ish cake, I also did a couple of time-consuming cut-outs for the cake instead of many 3-D figures. A 70s roller-skating chick and silhouettes of boys and girls with afro hair, mini skirts and bell-bottoms doing disco moves. Made the birthday girl figurine as centre of attraction AND lots of edible disco dusts! p/s: After these pictures were taken, I realised that the name was spelled wrongly. Thank goodness it was just replacing one alphabet or I'll have to redo the whole disco pole!
Young Master turns 11 today and he said "for fun", he'd like a Star Wars-themed cake. He's a huge Star Wars fan and the character he loves is Obi Wan Kenobi. So, here's my version of not-so-Old Ben...
and the Sith Lord... 
Young Master and Little Miss said that these two versions look like kids. I think they do, too... especially Darth Vader. He looks like a kid dressed up for Halloween! Our young Padawan loved it and was especially happy with his choice of cake - Chocolate Fudge layered between Vanilla Butter Cake and Rich Chocolate Cake. This 7" cake finished weighing 1.8kg.
"Red and yellow and pink and green, Purple and orange and blue,I can sing a rainbow, Sing a rainbow, Sing a rainbow too.
Listen with your eyes, Listen with your ears,
And sing everything you see, I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow, Sing along with me"
The Rainbow Song was all I was humming in my head while working on this simple but apt design for a 5-year old. This little 7" Rich Chocolate Cake weighed only 1kg.
This year's Hari Raya cupcakes - the one and only set this year! Was away for a week prior and during the long Raya holidays so I missed out the festive bake-rush this year. Nonetheless, these were Lemon Poppyseed Cupcakes.
This young man is a hip-hop breakdancer... I know hip-hop and I know breakdancing. But hip-hop brakdancing? I can only assume it means breakdancing to hip-hop music. Nevertheless, I Googled for a couple of pictures of hip-hop breakdancing and my jaw dropped. These kids can really do stuffs! I can't imagine the number of emergency room check-ins with the kind of the stunts they do! #mumspeak# Anyway, I had to decide which stunt was possible to work on using sugar with my limited skills and I chose a move that was kind of what they call a Jackhammer. To top it off, the birthday boy actually wanted a trampoline for his birthday but that wasn't possible with them living in a condo. So...he'll have to make do with brakdancing on a cake trampoline ;-)
This 8" round Vanilla Butter Cake weighed 1.5kg. Great size for a small party of 10. 
This mahjong cake was called for to celebrate a 70th birthday a weekend ago. The last time I did a similar cake was for my mum-in-law's 90th birthday in May and it was a huge hit. I had intended to do a full table this time round but the large party was scaled down at the request of the birthday boy so I had to reduce the size of the cake, too. I couldn't have done a "smaller table" because the mahjong tiles need to be actual-size for better effect. So, we had a 1/4 of a table. I also did away with the green felt and placed the layers of white mahjong "papers" to represent the majority of our home mahjong tables. The 13-tile winning combo is again featured here (I can't think of any better combo than this to wipe out everyone's winnings!) with the usual suspects - dices, chips and the directional token. This 10" Devil's Food Cake weighed 2.4kg.
