Running shoe cake - April 2015

40th birthday cake for a lady with a passion for running.

Vanilla buttercream covered chocolate fudge cake with dark chocolate buttercream filling.  

The sides are piped rose swirls in orange and pink. The top I kept smooth because of the toppers. 

I used the upside-down method to keep it ultra-smooth and swirled the colours to compliment the sides of the cake.

The number 40 and flowers are wired.  

The running shoe is made from a Mexican paste core shape with flowerpaste details.

Happy surprise birthday party Abbi :)

Safari birthday cake - August 2014

Today was my friend Clare's 40th birthday so her family threw her a surprise birthday party.  She has a big love of giraffes so her daughter Cerys wanted a giraffe based cake.  

Cerys has a real talent for sugarcraft so she made the star of the cake, a gorgeous wired giraffe.

The cake was a torted chocolate fudge cake with alternated dark chocolate and white vanilla buttercream.

To make the palm trees, I covered drinking straws with chocolate style candy melts and scored with a cocktail stick to produce the scaled effect. I wired 4 sizes of flower paste leaves, taped them together and inserted the stem into the chocolate covered straws.  I poked bamboo BBQ skewers into the cake at the required angles, chopped offll the excess with some snips and popped the trees onto them.

To make the palm fronds I used a basic leaf cutter set and my new homemade leaf veiner, then cut notches out of the leaves before drying them in position.

The larger letters and the numbers I made out of thin sausages of Mexican paste, then extruded even thinner sausages to make the smaller letters. I hand painted the "40" to reflect the giraffe theme.

I covered the cake and board with pale yellow fondant, airbrushed it with brown, yellow and green edible colour, piped on some grasses and added some fondant tufts of  grass around the trees and lettering.

Happy birthday lovely lady.  Hope you enjoyed your party, you are very loved and very deserving of that love. X