a circus cake for Andy's 6th birthday

My youngest son Andy turned six this year (hard to believe!). He wanted a circus cake. So out came our trusty Women's Weekly birthday cake book, and we made ourselves a big top.

Here's how we did it. We started with two gluten free cakes (made from a cake mix) and lots of stripy sour straps.

We hollowed out the top of one cake (in the recipe you hollow it out all the way down, but we just did the top bit - you'll see why later) and used the cake scraps to make the "point" on the other cake.

We made a triple batch of blue butter icing,

and spread it over the two cakes.

We filled the hollow with lollies (now you know why I didn't hollow out the cake all the way down, even though the kids wanted me to: "Go deeper, go deeper, Mummy!").

We used sour straps to make the stripes on our big top (toothpicks helped secure the stubborn bits),

then put the pointy cake on the other one. We used a couple of Nerds Ropes (I can't believe there's a Wikipedia entry on that!) to cover the join between the two cakes.

The final touches were some "happy birthday" candles and balloons, and a Duplo ringmaster and animals.

"Happy birthday, dear Andy, happy birthday to you!"

The best bit was the kids' faces when I lifted off the top and they saw the lollies underneath... Surprise!