Panda cake

This is a 10" round sponge that was 3" deep before torting and filling.  Brief was Panda eating bamboo with spots on the cake.  Recipient was very happy.

Frozen Planter cake

Here is my first cake since returning from the Falklands.  It was quite fun to make.  I was trying to not make it look like an old xmas cake with the stippled royal icing.

T birds Jacket

As usual, my first cake of the year is the boys birthday cake.  They are having a karaoke party tonight and they will be singing the songs from grease - so they wanted a grease themed cake and they found a t-birds cake so this is what they picked.

The body is chocolate sponge and the arms vanilla sponge.  I didnt have enough black icing and I do not like eating black icing because it makes your mouth go a horrid colour so I covered it in white and airbrushed it.  It still looks shiny so it actually looks like leather.

Swimming pool cake

Here is my last cake of 2011.  A pool cake for Jo, who taught my boys to swim.  It is a 9" x 7" sponge cake filled with jam and buttercream.

Jo's 50th Birthday cupcake tower

Here I made the top tier for a cupcake tower.

The cake is a 6" square deep chocolate cake filled with chocolate fudge filling. Jo's duaghter made and decorated all of the cupcakes and what a fab job she made of them.  The cupcake tower looked fabulous

Boeing 747

How stressful.!!!

It turned out ok in the end though.

Supermarket cakes

Do you think a bake from scratch cake maker is too expensive for your Wedding day, so you would rather get a supermarket cake to decorate your self.  Look at the pictures below and you might change your mind.  These were taken by a very skillful cake decorator who was asked to make a topper and stack the bought cake.  When she saw the state of it, she had to add additional decoration to try and inprove the cake.  Without mentioning any names, this cake came from a shop that you wouldn't really call a supermarket as it sells mainly clothes.  Lets hope you do not win a prize of a wedding cake in the facebook pass the parcel game.

Here are the 4 cakes that measured 4", 5.5" 9" and 10.75" that I can only assume were meant to be 4", 6" 8" and 10".   It is not immediately obvious how poor the covering is on the cakes although you can see how shallow the largest tier is.

And closer detail of the cakes - the shape of the cake in the image below is not camera distortion - it actually sloped that badly!

What the cake decorator managed to make these into - a major improvement on what it started as: 

(the ribbon around the cake isn't normal width cake ribbon, it is 15mm ribbon that you normally use around the cake board. Just shows how shallow the cake really is. She also left the piped swirls and wonky blobs on the cake so it is still identifiable as the supermarket cake as she does not want any link to such a shoddy finish)

If you as the untrained eye think that is not that bad,  take a look below at a comparison of another 4 tier cake from the same decorator.  One is a 5 tier cake but the top tier has been chopped off to make it comparable. Also an extra board has been placed under the 5 tier cake to take into account that the shop one was also double boarded (needed to to add height).

This picture is a slice of fruitcake from the same shop.  Clearly the sugar paste and marzipan wish to disassociate themselves with the cake.

Here is another comparison which clearly shows the differnece in depth of cake. 

 

At the end of the day, you will get what you have paid for and I appreciate that not every ones budget stretches to a bespoke cake, but if you have to pay a cake decorator to rescue your cake after you have already paid the supermarket for the cake - you might as well have paid the cake decorator to do you a bespoke cake in the first place.

xxx