King of the Mountain Cycling Jersey Cake

My dad's favourite hobby is cycling, and when it came time to make a cake for his birthday we knew that it needed to have a cycling theme. I've unsuccessfully tried to make bicycles from sugar before so quickly ruled out designs that needed any kind of bicycle. In the end I settled on this more achievable jersey\t-shirt shape.

This cake was very much a family affair - made in collaboration with my mum with even some decorating assistance from my husband. We settled on the template style from this blog which seemed to both minimise the amount of off-cut wastage and also involved joining few pieces so the cake would still have some structure.

The left image below shows the template and how the jersey can be cut from a 12" x 10" cake - the largest we could make in a 12" adjustable cake tin. The right image shows the proportions on a 14" cake board.

Mum baked the two massive sponges and soaked them with syrup before allowing them to firm up in the fridge overnight. This step was really important given the cakes were to be carved. They needed to be cooled properly or would have been be too crumbly. The next day she sliced the cakes into layers and filled them with jam and buttercream. Mum then cut around the template and rounded and softened the edges to make a less angular shape and finally coated with a generous layer of buttercream.

I decorated the cake whilst Mum got on with preparing the rest of the food for the family barbecue.

As usual I covered with a layer of marzipan then a layer of sugarpaste. As the shape was weird this didn't go around the arms smoothly but with a bit of trimming, coaxing and polishing then it eventually looked good.

I've struggled in the past to make really deep black or red icing so to keep things simple I bought Squires Kitchen ready coloured icing from the supermarket. I added some Tylo powder to the coloured icing so that it could be rolled really thinly. For the black decoration I simply wrote out 'DAD 50' in a word processor and printed that out. I used scissors to cut out the letters as templates that I placed on the icing to cut around with a knife. The circles were cut using a round cutter. After cutting I left the shapes to dry for 10 minutes to firm up before transferring to the cake and sticking down with edible glue made from more Tylo.