The Alicorn Cake

 Marina was considering a Pegasus. I was thinking about doing a unicorn, something along the lines of the Unicorn Tapestries. We ended up meeting each other halfway, so her birthday cake was the Alicorn, a winged unicorn.

This time I made up the cookie recipe and pressed the cookies out rather than roll them. Cookies were used to make the wings, horn, flowers and garland. I'm happy with how the horn turned out, but I wish I had more time to figure out the tail. I suppose the chocolate buttercream pony tail worked, it just looks too short and it probably should have been white, but I had already mixed in the chocolate. I also would have liked to shape the front legs better. The velvet cake recipe still gives the best texture for carving out cake designs. If you are wondering, I'm writing these notes for myself. This is how I figure out what cakes I use from year to year.

Marina turned twenty. I have a twenty year old daughter. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that. Click on the picture and take a good look at that sweater she's wearing. She spent a year knitting it (she kept getting interrupted) and it is beautiful. She finally has the time to catch up and finish some other projects. She had a busy spring semester. Putting wings on her cake was very appropriate. She is about to test her own. The summer will include a trip to England to study for two weeks at Cambridge. Those will be the last three credits she needs for her associate's degree and then she will be going away to art school at a university about two hours away. Big changes for all of us. I am nervous and happy for her.

And I still can't believe she's twenty.