A Dad making cakes

Our family has a birthday season. My second son, only daughter, wife and I all have our birthdays at about the same time so it's cake season. For this reason my poor wife never gets a nice cake. Not this year I said to her, you get a nice cake for a change. My wife requested a mousse cake so I said "OK" and thought I would have a crack at making one. I was also inspired by all the amazing 'mirror cakes' I had seen so was keen to attempt the mythical 'mirror cake'.  My deadline was Saturday so I found a basic mousse and mirror glaze recipe and worked backwards from there to see when I needed to prepare. The answer was Thursday at the latest so let's start a day earlier just in case. Wednesday: Purchased the ingredients, googled the recipes and was all exited & ready to go. I started with a basic ripple biscuit base which I use for cheese cakes and used a rice scoop to smooth the base. Popped the base into the freezer...

My 3 year old is a typical boy and loves all building and construction related items. We have been fortunate enough to build a house in the last year much to his joy. At one stage I think his vocabulary solely consisted of 'digger', 'bulldozer' and 'tractor'. And 'no', he knew how to say 'no'... As usual I asked him what sort of cake he would like for his birthday and a 'building' cake it was. I had a quick think of the various building or construction cakes I could make and settled on a quarry type design where trucks could ride up and down levels doing their thing. Our sons Godfather (not the Italian type with horse heads lying about) is a civil engineer so I sent him cryptic messages over a number of days seeking his input on plant and equipment management at a quarry site.  After a few days of intrigue I finally let on that my questions were cake related. Poor guy, I think he was keen to sink his teeth into a big ca...

I've been keen to have a cake turntable for a while but couldn't seem to find a turntable which didn't wobble a fair amount. I even shopped around at a few fancy kitchen stores and their turntables also wobbled.  All the turntables I saw had an axle as the only support which would be great if the tables used a really high quality bearing and mounting but sadly even the expensive tables used cheap components.  I decided to take matters into my own hands and simply make a crude turntable. My difference would be to switch the support from a centre axle to a few wheels on the outside of the table to spread the weigh around and hopefully allow a smooth action. O, and NO WOBBLE! Off to Bunnings I went with the 3 kids in tow. Bunnings is our standard Daddy daycare outing as we all have a blast playing with the various tools and imagining the projects we can work on. The kids park and free popcorn doesn't hurt either....  Enough distractions, back to the tabl...