A Settler's Birthday!

I changed my mind on the design of this cake a couple of days beforehand, sometimes ideas come and go, suggestions are made and I still feel uninspired. This one clicked into place for me and I knew that I wanted to do it, even after a busy month of cakes, it still seemed like a fun idea.

There may be many of you who have never heard of the board game Settlers of Catan, but the recipient of this Birthday cake is a big fan of it. For reference - this is what it looks like:

The idea was to combine this with a cake - easy, right? My very first hiccup on this project was during the planning process, it suddenly became very clear that I had forgotten how to draw a hexagon (in my defence I have not needed to draw a hexagon since school, which was 12 years ago), thank goodness for the internet!

I made two victoria sponges, once they were completely cool, I iced the middle and prepared to start decorating!

I started with covering the cake in butter icing that I had coloured blue, I covered it once and made the butter icing a slightly darker blue and iced again around the bottom of the cake. I wanted to give it a choppy sea effect

Happy with the butter icing, I popped it in the fridge to set a little, whilst I carried on with the royal icing. Firstly, I needed to make a template, this is where I got a little stuck, so after much internet search and measuring, etc, I had my template. I decided to make 2 sheep hexagons, 1 quarry, 1 brick, 1 wood, 1 wheat and every board has a desert, so I could not miss that out. I had to colour icing in 6 different colours and cut out the hexagons. 

All cut out, they were ready to go on the cake. the next step was to make them look like the hexagons from the game, as the game is fairly detailed, I used the colours I had and hand painted the detail on.

To make it look like more of a game board (like the above picture), I piped around the edges in a light yellow water icing, creating extra little yellow patches in every other corner for ports.

Part of the game involves using counters on each hexagon, I made them next out of a light yellow royal icing and used the black edible pen to write the numbers, then placed them in the middle of the hexagons. Using the same colour, I made the sails for the ships in the ports too, used small amounts of coloured royal icing to make the little icons and again used the edible black pen to write the numbers. Once they were in place, I made the ships themselves out of brown icing and added them to the cake. 

The only things left were the 3D details. I made the Theif out of royal icing and placed him on the desert hexagon - which is where he starts in the game.

I then made 3 houses (or settlements) one white, one blue and one red and placed them in potential starting positions with the rectangle pieces that illustrate roads in the game.I then made a quick scroll out of some left over light yellow icing and some left over brown icing and rolled up each edge, then wrote a Happy Birthday message. I also added some white water icing to the sides of the cake to portray waves, but they are difficult to see from the pictures. Then finally it was done.

Really pleased with the outcome, I worried overnight that the colours that were painted on would run, but they stayed put and I think the effect was really great and it was such fun to make!

Total Time Spent: 4.5 Hours
Useful Tips Gained: You make a hexagon using a circle
Items to Purchase: More paintbrushes
Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous Items Wished For: More colours

A Special 50th Birthday

The second cake that I needed to make last week was for Gavin's Mum, this cake was not one of my usual novelty cakes. I had a hint that if  I was planning on making a cake for her it needed to be her favourite - Carrot Cake. This kind of limited me to making a pretty one by doing some special kind of piping and some Amazon purchases to make it look special. 

I made a big cake - perhaps a little too big as they were still eating it after the surprise party! 

I filled the middle with cream cheese icing and then made more for the outside of the cake itself. Firstly I covered the entire cake in a light layer, to avoid any gaps showing cake when I piped on top of it. I then swirled icing with the piping gun using the star nozzle to give a white rose effect all over.

I purchased the sparkly 50 from Amazon and bought some gems that they usually put in with flowers when making bouquets from there too, I placed them at the back like fireworks

Total Time Spent: 3 hours

Useful Tips Gained: Butter icing based cakes take far less time than royal icing cakes

Items to Purchase: None

Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: None

Miscellaneous Items Wished for: None, although I would still like a mannequin for sewing, I might have to treat myself at the end of the month :)

Lions are Ginger too!

Last week was a bit of a week from hell, not only was I unwell for the first part of the week - I also had two cakes to make in 1 week - short on time, I didn't really stop to take many photos. 

The first one I made was for a friend of mine, she ordered a lion cake, which had to be ginger - for her partner (the same recipient as the hippo cake last year). It was just a little cake, so it actually didn't take all that long and the components were fairly simple. 

I made a small chocolate cake with chocolate and ginger butter icing in the middle. I then covered the cake in yellow butter icing. 

I then cut out white circles, along with smaller black circles and slightly smaller white circles - for the eyes.

Using a small amount of brown colouring, I made the light brown circles for the cheeks and marked dots onto them. 

Colouring more icing dark brown, I was then able to make the eye brows, mouth, nose and ears. Happy that they were all in the right place, I stuck them down and piped on the whiskers. 

Finally I made the orange butter icing to make the ginger mane, using the star shaped piping nozzle, I created swirly hair for the mane. I also piped around the bottom of the cake, but you can't really see it from the photo.

Total Time Spent: 4 hours one of my quicker cakes
Useful Tips Gained: stick the cake to the board because it can move in the car - thankfully I managed to rectify the small amount of damage caused.
Items to Purchase: None
Items added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous Items Wished For: A Mannequin - but that's for sewing related purposes...

It's all about the Rugby and turning 50

I made this cake last month for a 50th Birthday of a Plymouth Rugby fan. When I first volunteered, I had this image of a rugby ball in my head that turned out to be an American Football and nothing like what an actual rugby ball looks like - this one was a bit more complicated than I initially thought, but it was worth the effort. 

Just for some background information - I used this heraldic symbol as inspiration:

On their website, I found a picture of the below rugby ball, my plan was to simplify it and put it on a cake.

After having baked the cakes, this creation needed some serious shaping to get the rugby ball shape. Cutting away from the top and using another part of a cake for the ends, we were getting somewhere

I then made some butter icing and mixed it with crumbled cake, it filled the gaps and will give a smooth finish to the cake

I then covered the cake in white royal icing and used my smoother to polish it off a bit

Then the tricky part starts - creating the details. Instead of  making the lions on the above picture, because really they are above my abilities - I made a 5 and a 0, I hand cut them and included little lion tails to keep the effect of the heraldic symbol in the above picture. In the middle is the sketch of the coat of arms that I needed to place there to keep the spacing right.

I made the coat of arms by cutting the shield out of grey icing using the sketch I made onto the baking parchment and creating the green cross and miniature castles. I then piped green butter icing onto the board using the multiple hole piping nozzle to give a grass effect.

The grass effect can be seen a little more clearly in the below picture:

After all that piping, I was ready to go back to making the little details. I made some little blue crowns that the lions have around their necks for the 5 and the 0.

I then made another crown for the middle and a claw coming out of the top holding a red anchor, then added the little medallions onto the crowns on the numbers. 

With the detailed part over with, I was able to create some stripes on the ball out of black and red

To finish it off I then made a small white square for a sign and placed a black piece of icing behind it and using the black edible pen, wrote Happy Birthday on the sign. 

Another cake that I was happy with, even if I did have green hands for a few days afterwards.

Total Time Spent: 7.5 Hours
Useful Tips Gained: Do more research before volunteering for cakes
Items To Purchase: None
Items Added to Amazon Wishlist - None
Miscellaneous Items Wished For - None

I made this cake shortly after Christmas - one of my gifts was a cake lifter! Very handy - I love it!

Amazing Birthday Cake for Gavin!

So it's been a while! Hi! I've taken about 3 months off from blogging, but I have been busy with cakes, so I will get this up to date as soon as I can. Apologies, I have no real excuse, I have just been busy with Christmas and New Year and then distracted playing with my Christmas Gifts!

Gavin's Birthday was at the beginning of December, I have always avoided doing a Spider-Man cake because it's a bit of a go-to for him to have Spider-Man things and I wanted to be able to do it justice, I wanted to avoid a plain old run of the mill Spider-Man cake - they are so simple, you can buy them from the supermarkets. No, I wanted something a little outside the box that would be fit for a true fan. I chose the face of many Spider-Mans. These were my inspiration;

Spider-Man himself- for obvious reasons - enough said

The Scarlet Spider - a clone of Peter Parker in the Comics who becomes a stand in for our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man

Spider-Man 2099 - A version of  Spider-Man from the comics set in the future

Symbiote Spider-Man - Still our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man but wearing an alien life-form suit, which later became Venom in the comics

4 faces of Spider-Man to make up 4 sides of a cake, I thought it was a fun idea, they all had different spiders, colours and eyes, which would make the cake fairly interesting.

I made it two tier so that I had enough space to make the different faces, spiders and backgrounds. The tiers were made from a large chocolate cake on the bottom and a smaller mint chocolate cake on the top.

I started off by covering the bottom layer with red roll our icing

Once it was covered and smoothed out, I marked a cross on the cake - going through the centre, to gage where each segment would go. I rolled out and covered one quarter of it with black icing for the Symbiote Spider side of the cake.

I wanted the top tier to be a plainer colour so that the face stood out, I also wanted to bring in the Spider-Man perch effect, so I made the top tier into a something that looks like the top of an old building. So I covered the top tier in grey icing. 

I cut out the shape of a face and painted it black to ensure that I got the blackest colour I could get

Using white royal icing, I made eyes for the face of the Symbiote Spider and used the photo of the Marvel figurine to craft the spider to stick on him too, then the Symbiote Spider side was complete. One down - three to go.

I decided to do the most complicated Spider to basically get him over and done with - the Spider-Man 2099. I cut the face out of red icing and painted over it with blue colouring to match his face mask. I also painted the bottom layer to match the colouring on his chest. I then created the spider from his chest out of red royal icing - as it's a flying spider, it was a little tricky, but I got it after a couple of tries - two down - two to go

You can also see from the below picture, that I've added the black building swirls to the edges too.

Spider-Man himself needed to be next - with the patterning to do on his face and on the bottom layer cake, I needed to make sure that this was right without messing it up - as I was using an icing pen and drawing this freehand straight onto the cake. I made his face shape and eyes and drew the web patterns on

Happy that I managed to get that right, I then took the freehand drawing to the bottom layer cake to complete the patterning. Once that was finished, I made the black spider from his chest and Spider-Man side was done - three down - one to go

Scarlet Spider's face was fairly simple, the only slightly tricky thing was his eyes were different to the rest of them, I shaped them by hand quite a few times before I was happy that they were right. I painted the bottom layer to match the colouring on his chest and made the black spider out of royal icing - four Spider-man sides done!

All that was left was to write Happy Birthday Gavin on the top of the cake and it was ready for the glorious tea party that followed. 

Gavin absolutely loved it and I think he liked that I went in a slightly different direction with the cake than just a normal Spider-Man face, this is a cake for a Spider-Man fan - and that's my Gavin.

Total Time Spent: 6 Hours (I think - we are talking 2 and a half months ago)

Useful Tips Gained: Do not be scared to draw directly on the cake

Items to Purchase: More edible pens!

Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: More edible pens!

Miscellaneous Items Wished For: None.

Credits - Thanks to Gavin, who provided very useful information on the background of various Spider-Man characters mentioned above.