John's Birthday Cake(s)

My husband John turned 50 about 2 weeks ago. To celebrate we gathered friends and family at our favourite local Japanese Restaurant - Taiko.

Despite things being pretty crazy for us at the moment - John is about to deploy with the Army to South Sudan for six months and some health issues for me, I wanted to do something special for a cake for him.


When I first met John he worked for Apple New Zealand - his job description was 'Apple Evangelist'. In my career Apple computers have been a very important tool. Apple products are pretty important to all of our family. My idea for a cake was to use the 'Apple' logo as inspiration. I hunted on 'Pintrest' for ideas and found some good ones. Several years ago the Apple logo had rainbow stripes...this seemed like a great idea.

I purchased coloured fondant icing for the cake. The colours were not exactly right but it looked good. Luckily I had my Mum helping. The icing took far far longer than I expected! We measured the stripes of the icing, but the stretched when we lifted them on to the cake.
I used butter cream icing over the cake before laying over the fondant. The cake was made using my failsafe banana cake recipe with chocolate chips added.



I was a little unsure how many people I was feeding so decided to supplement the cake with 'camouflage' cupcakes as a 'nod' to the importance of the Army in

his life.
To make the cupcakes I just coloured basic cupcake mixture and added a bit at a time to create the pattern.



Butter Cream Icing

125 g softened butter
1 tbsp warm milk
flavouring of your choice
colouring of your choice
375 g icing sugar


Put the butter, milk and any flavour or colour in a mixing bowl or use food processor. Sift in the icing sugar a little at a time and beat well between each addition until it has all been incorporated and the mixture is light and creamy.