A CO Down-born mum has really outdone herself when it came to celebrating her twin daughters' first birthday. Lara Mason make sure her girls Lyla and Lily were seeing double on their big day when she created two replica cake models of the toddlers themselves.
Despite being faced with realistic cake versions of themselves, the twins made short work of their smaller actual cakes in a 'cake smash', a fun – if messy – popular trend in celebrating baby birthdays that originated in the US.
The cakes of Lyla and Lily, whose official birthday is tomorrow, were made out of 22 separate 6 inch round Madeira cakes and 4kg of buttercream and covered with 3kg of fondant icing and 5kg of chocolate.
A total of 44 eggs, 2.2kg flour, sugar and butter were used just for the cakes and it took Lara over 100 hours of work to make the cakes for her only children.
"The hair is made out of pulled sugar so I had to make every individual strand separately, so I'd say that was the hardest part. It's the most critical I have ever been while making 'cake people' because I feel like I did such a good job making them so cute in the first place," Lara jokes.
"I'll be cleaning buttercream out of the floorboards for months but I reckon it was 100 per cent worth it."
The twins had a small slice of cake to enjoy while their cake models were put on display at a family party.
Lara, whose maiden name is Clarke and is originally from Saintfield, is an award-winning baker in England, who has made headlines with her life-size cake models of actress Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games and Celine Dion.
Her first attempt of making a child cake was one of Prince George when he was a toddler.
