Lord of the Isles

This is the cake I baked for my husband Stuart's birthday. I baked this in a rush in just one evening as a surprise for Stuart to take to work.

This is my own design and I'm rather pleased with it. The design is based on Stuart's kilt tartan; the 'Macdonald Lord of the Isles Hunting Ancient'. I had the idea to make a tartan cake after using the pasta machine to roll out sugarpaste ribbons for the delightful present cake.

I bake a lot of square cakes in my fantastic Silverwood  adjustable cake tin. It gives me the flexibility to make any sized rectangular cakes I like - or up to four 6" square cakes at the same time. In our tiny kitchen this multi-functional tin is a great.

To start I iced the sponge cake with regular sugarpaste that I had coloured a dark green. I then added Tylo powder to some extra paste to stiffen it to a gum and added the colouring. The pasta machine was used to roll thick ribbons of the blue icing which was simply sliced using a ruler and sharp knife. Then the tagliatelle attachment was used to make the black and white ribbons and the spaghetti cutter for the red ribbon. I interwove the strands and glued them onto the layer underneath with a dab of clear alcohol.

The cake was very well received in Stuart's office and I'm looking forward to trying other tartan designs in future!

A birthday present

I baked and iced this cake for my friend Robyn's birthday party at Kettner's in Soho. It's based on a design from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes which is one of my favourite cake decorating books. The original design uses a green bow and pink spots but I much prefer these more grown up shades of purple.

The bow is made from regular supermarket sugarpaste with some added Tylo powder to make it stiffer. In fact it was so stiff I struggled to roll out the paste and resorted to using the pasta machine - which was actually really effective at creating a ribbon of consistent thickness. The ribbon is dusted with some edible lustre dust to create the shimmery effect.