Time flies when you are having fun! The past year was filled with several personal achievements and lots and lots of fun, my granddaughter’s third birthday being the best of them. Much of my time and energy was applied to writing short stories and novellas. I published two novellas during the past twelve months and am working on a book of short stories and flash fiction. The novellas, The Star Alliance and The Quantum Butterfly Effect are available on Amazon. Buy a copy, or read for free on Amazon Prime and let me know what you think.

This year’s birthday theme was Disney’s “Frozen.” Grace loves all the Disney princesses (Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” is her favorite.) As a special surprise, Princess Elsa and her sister Anna, visited Grace’s birthday party! (I was Chef Louie.)

Keeping with the theme I made a six layer “Frozen” cake, two 10″ vanilla as the base, two 8″ chocolate in the middle and two 5″ vanilla for the top. I offset the layers to provide a ledge for the characters of Anna and Olaf, the snowman.

The cakes were crumb coated with buttercream to which I added a few drops of purple and blue food coloring with minimal stirring. This provided the swirling ice sheet pattern to the cake. Remember to put some aside for coloring to be used as the trees, tree trunk and snow. (I also made a half sheet cake to assure there was enough for everyone at the party. I left this with the frozen ice design rather than frosting with the meringue.

The frosting was a basic meringue stabilized with boiling corn syrup. It needs to be applied and sculpted to the cake quickly as it firms rapidly and will skin over when cool. Again, put some in a piping bag to use as icicles and touch up around the cake.

Blue food color spray added the ice highlights which really finished the cakes. The figurines made great toys for the birthday girl, Princess Grace.