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!