30th Birthday Cake

I baked this cake for my very good friend Matt's recent birthday.

I really need to buy another round 15cm cake tin as I keep having to bake the two layers in two separate batches! That's probably the reason I often bake a square cake instead of a round one! This cake was made with a four egg mixture (200g butter, 200g sugar, 4 eggs and 200g flour) so came out very tall at 10cm. I really like tall tiers as I think it makes them more special.

I usually struggle to think of ideas for cakes for men. So much of cake decorating is making pretty cakes that aren't really appropriate for guys. For my husband's last birthday I iced the tartan cake and used that for inspiration for this argyle pattern.

After applying the marzipan and sugarpaste I cut the diamonds out of more sugarpaste. A mix of sugarpaste and flower paste would probably have given a better finish as I would have been able to roll it thinner and it would have been less stretchy - but I've run out of flower paste at the moment so had to settle for the regular icing. The white lines were made with the tagliatelle pasta cutter. I made a template from the lettering on top by simply printing the characters onto A4 paper and cutting them out. I lay this on top of the icing and cut around with a sharp knife.

Cakes on a plane

Last week I made a Patchwork cake based on the design in Sugarcraft 3 as a surprise for my Mother-in-law's birthday.

I've been wanting to bake this for a while. The design uses the Patchwork Squares cutters to cut and emboss the patchwork design out of stencil paste. I really like the texture and femininity of the cake.

I was running short of time to finish this before our flight to Scotland, but next time I'd like to try dusting parts of the design to add a bit of colour variety. We were very pleased that the cake made it from Greenwich to Glasgow unscathed!

Looking forward to trying some more needlework and fabric designs :)