Woodland Fairy First Birthday

Woodland Fairy First Birthday! We celebrated our girl’s first birthday a few months ago, and it was so fun! I wanted to share a couple things I made for the party—a fairy cake and little fairy house decoration.

To make the fairy house all I used was an ArtMinds Mini Hut Birdhouse from Michaels, hot glue, stones, a couple pine cones, and bark. The fairy figurines and door on the cake are from Michaels as well.

Start by removing scales from the pine cone and hot gluing them around the top of the hut, from large pieces to small. Next, hot glue pieces of bark to form a door on the hut. I found two pieces that were already curved nicely, but you can also use an x-acto to cut the bark down. Use a small stone or another piece of bark to form a handle on the door, and hot glue it on. Last, hot glue stones around the base of the hut, filling in gaps so the hut is covered and looks like it is made of stacked stones. It doesn’t have to be perfect to look great!

This was my first time making a cake, and I used a stump de noel cake from sprinklebakes.com as the basis for the fairy cake. The cake is chocolate (from a box ha ha) with a raspberry buttercream (that turned out delicious!). The “moss” is pistachios—I added extra color by mixing with moss green Wilton gel food coloring.

The butterfly is a pre-made icing decoration and the flowers and leaves I made using buttercream frosting with delphinium blue, juniper green, and violet Wilton food coloring. The chocolate “bark” frosting is from the Sprinkle Bakes blog—it uses butter, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, and melted semisweet chocolate.

I am hoping to save a little money over time on birthday cakes by making them myself, but it definitely wasn’t a task that came easily to me. It took a bit of an investment up front as well because I didn’t have any of the necessary tools or supplies, like cake tins, cake strips, an icing spatula, and piping bags and tips. What was your first experience with baking a cake? Maybe next time I will be brave enough to try to bake a cake from scratch!