Tumble Tots cake

Both children have actively taken part and very much enjoyed an activity called Tumble Tots over the past few years and Helen, the lady who has been the life and soul of our local Tumble Tots for the past 20 years, took early retirement today. I couldn't let it pass without contributing a thank you cake to the farewell party.

I was originally going to do a Mr Tumble Tot shaped cake but found out someone had done something similar for her last year so I thought I would go one step further and create a mini tumble tots activity session on the top. The most ambitious part was creating two ladders which turned out okay but which proved extremely difficult to prop up against each other on the cake - in the end I made a triangular soft slide that sat between the two ladders and supported them.

I created a selection of other "equipment" and also had a go at making a mini Helen and a mini Mr Tumble Tot. He turned out to look more like the "real" thing than Helen did (she originated from Hong Kong but you would never guess that from the mini figure) but I was still pleased with my first ever person!

Helen's pose is truly representative of her: part of the TT "warm up" is asking the children if they can touch their nose with their toes and Helen was exceedingly agile and could easily do this - hence the mini Helen's pose!

I created the ladders by using my extruder to produce a fat string and then feeding dried spaghetti into the middle of the string and rolling it to smooth it out again. I made two long ones for each ladder and several shorter ones with spaghetti sticking out either end which I then pushed into the long ones to create the rungs. I then had to be patient and let the fondant completely dry out so that they were firm enough to stand up.

It was a fun and novel cake to do and I had lots of lovely comments from the other people, not just about the decoration but the quality of the cake too which was really nice to hear. I think I am going to have cake withdrawal symptoms as I have no other cakes in the pipeline. Perhaps that's a good thing as it is the summer holidays and I can focus on the children and then in September I plan to start working my way through various cake books trying lots of new recipes and experimenting ...

© 2011 Nicola Noble