Christmas Tree

My neighbor asked me to make a cake for her mother that they were going to bring over for Christmas. She brought me a picture of one that her mother was absolutely in love with. After examining the picture for quite a while, because it was fairly low resolution, I realized that the tree in the picture was made of fondant or sugar paste. The person who made the original cake in the picture wanted to reuse the tree. I didn't like that idea, so I started modifying the cake design.

I decided to use cookies for my tree. I have a nesting star cookie cutter set. The problem is, one of the cutters is missing. Regardless, I made some sugar cookies and started cutting them into the various sizes I would need. I had to manually cut out the start in the size I was missing. After the cookies cooled, I glazed them with royal icing and stacked them up in a spiral pattern so it would look more like a tree and not a stack of cookies. After that, I piped in "ornaments" for the tree and little icicles. Some of the ornaments are tiny balls of fondant.



The cake was white with butter cream icing. The presents under the tree, including the bows, were made from marshmallow fondant.

This cake worked out great. The kids ate the cake, and the adults sat around eating the cookies with their coffee since it was pretty early. The mother loved the cake so much that she cried when they gave it to her. I'm told that she also has a picture of it hanging prominently on her wall.