KIDS' BIRTHDAY CAKE

This is a fool-proof recipe. We have used this to make all sorts of birthday cakes over the years: trains, castles, jungles, ponds, harry potter worlds, various football clubs emblems, t-shirts, cakes with candy and sugared pictures...you name it.  You can either decorate the cake with buttercream and royal icing of various colours (as in the picture) or cut it into different shapes and glue them with buttercream. It is a tough yet not too heavy cake so it stands all sorts of icing (when we did a jungle we used 500 g of green royal icing and it did not collapse even a tiny bit)

You need:
325 g self raising flour
150 g plain flour
325 gr sugar
325 gr soft butter
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
5 eggs

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees.  Mix the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until it becomes pale yellow. Separately mix the flour (sieve them if you are not going to use a lot of icing; also, if you are going to cut the cake into shapes then don't bother with the shifting) Add one egg, then one table spoon of flour, then another egg and so on until you use all the eggs. Add the vanilla essence and then add the rest of the flour by folding it into the butter mixture. Bake for 50 minutes (we have done this in all sorts of tins and frankly it always comes out well).