Since her second birthday, I’ve made a topper for Mila’s birthday cake. After the more clearly defined characters of Shaun the Sheep and Bluey, Mila is now very much into unicorns, so the most recent cake topper’s creative direction was a lot more open, which was both a blessing and a curse: I had more freedom, but that also meant more could go wrong.

I used Sketchbook on our iPad for a quick draft of the cake topper. It helped me make the many ideas specific. The early draft and the final result were pretty aligned.

This year, I wanted to try two new things: I wanted to use food paint—gold paint given the unicorn theme—and I wanted to defy gravity a tad more than previous years.

While the previous characters were sitting, the unicorn was going to stand. Turns out, one doesn’t just defy gravity, and I unnecessarily gave myself many extra issues in making the topper. All parts of the unicorn that could start to drop did so, and I had to spread finishing the topper over three evenings, each evening reinforcing and stabilising the figurine and letting it dry while supporting it with glasses and hoping I’d be able to remove that support on the final day. In the end it turned out okay, but next year’s characters are sitting again, that’s a given.

The food paint, however, worked great. I had the idea to add a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the gold coins were outstanding for masking some of the imperfections in the fondant.

Like last year, Kim made the actual cake. The six rainbow-coloured layers made for a super tall cake, and we used wooden dowels to support the topper and not end up with a flattened cake.

The final result turned out great.