I have been granted the great honour of the title “Fairy Cake Mother” – a position tasked with the sacred duty of creating birthday cakes for the newborn child of a dear friend until their 18th birthday…*

My first contribution pre-dated the birth: a baby shower cake celebrating a potential path for the first 25 years of the child’s life…

Originally planned as a snakes and ladders board, I decided instead to present the possible milestones without the judgement implied by a snake or ladder. It definitely wasn’t because I went crazy with ideas and then ran out of room… nope, definitely not that…

Click on the images below to see each age, or skip the gallery to see the descriptions, explanations and notes.

Except where noted below, everything but the toothpicks was edible, including the rice paper signs.  As usual, fondant and edible ink pens

• Age 1: Baby – fondant baby and tiny gummy bear teddy
• Age 3: First Peppa Pig-related parental breakdown – you know it’s coming… if it’s not the hundredth Peppa episode that puts you in the straight jacket, it’ll be the Wiggles or their successors
• Age 4: Discovers pork buns …. mmmmm pork buns….  – tiny honey bun things I found in a random Asian “Jerky House”
• Age 5: Discovers the fabulous comedy duo The Listies (and their tea-towel aliens) – you don’t need to steal a child to enjoy The Listies – a bunch of us adults regularly enjoy them without any excuse. The six year old I took to their 1 hour comedy children’s version of Hamlet (yep, you read that right) nearly stopped breathing she was laughing so much… 
• Age 6: Loses first tooth – foil covered coins and a fondant tooth
• Age 7: Discovers culinary “science at home” – the excuse her mother and I use for experimental food combinations that fail as often as they succeed (some things should never be mixed with prawn crackers)
• Age 10: Escapes bullies, names an empress, resurrects a horse – Bastian was ten for his Neverending Story adventure, so it’s entirely possible a similar adventure awaits as this child hits double digits (Artaaaaax!). Edible glitter gave Falcor his bling, and edible silver paint reproduced the book cover and Auryn
• Age 12: Finds a new passion – rollerskating, playing guitar or engineering, who knows what new thing will pique an interest
• Age 15: First broken heart – who knows when this will actually happen, or who for, it won’t be fun. 🙁  I cheated and this is from a store bought pack of gummy shapes, but even with a scalpel it was surprisingly difficult to cut the right crack.  Maybe my heart is just extra resilient…
• Age 16: Gets drivers licence – this a perfect fondant replica of my own licence… couldn’t you tell?
• Age 17: Escapes being erased from to history by ensuring her parents meet and fall in love – Marty McFly was 17 when he embarked on his fateful DeLorean adventure let’s hope the guitar lessons have kicked in by then. Silver-painted fondant car with painted rice paper doors.
  
• Age 19: Is caught singing on a parade float while wagging school – Ferris Bueller may not have been caught, but he hadn’t used up some of his luck in Fantasia, time-travelling or surviving science at home…
• Age 20: Gets jetpack licence – every generation imagines a future with jetpacks – perhaps by the time this child is 20, it’ll be a reality…
• Age 22: Saves the planet from alien invasion – who else but a young woman with experience in time travel and alternate worlds, her own jet pack and a great pair of bootskates could be relied upon to save the world? I like to think the failure of the green gel icing and the fondant Arctic circle to really work here are just a symptom of the havoc wrought by the invaders…
• Age 25: Moves out of home for good – some people expressed surprise that leaving home came so late (although who’s to say it wasn’t just the age she just finally cleared her stuff out of the garage)… But really this was just my way of justifying an end-age for the predicted future. 25 squares worked well and the framing of the 25 years as those at home with her parents created a nice narrative.  The box is fondant, the styrofoam ‘packing peanuts’ are slices of mini marshmallow.

The cake was chocolate mud with buttercream frosting, and red fruit ‘liquorice’ strap lines.

*I have been lucky enough to be awarded the title Fairy Cake Mother twice. Sadly, I now live in a different state to the first family to grace me with this honour, and it become more and more difficult to discharge my duties… Hopefully I can do better by the second and make it up to the first later.