August 19, 2011

Cake on a plane - 1/8/11

I was going to a funeral, and I'm not very good at arranging flowers so I thought that I'd make a cake with a bunch of flowers on top. So I looked online for pictures of flowers that I could use as a base, and I found this page of colouring sheets. I then simplified the picture a bit more using paint.net, and drew over it to check I could do it properly:

Coloured in version
Final outline shape


I made two of the same design in case one got broken. The outlines I made the night before, and then filled in with more runny icing (the same method as the floodwork flowers I made a few months ago).
Outlines
Finished designs

The cake is fruit cake iced with marzipan and sugarpaste. I added a yellow ribbon around the base as well. This is it after icing:

It was an eight inch square cake on an eight inch board, so I put it in an eight inch box and took it on a plane to the funeral. It survived very well under the seat in front of me! The edges of the icing cracked a little where they were squashed by the box but mostly it was fine.
The decoration I took on the greaseproof paper as well, and that also survived. However when I tried to take the decoration off the paper, it cracked into many tiny pieces. I think despite my simplifying, it was still too complicated a design for this method. I probably should have iced it onto a plaque of icing so that it didn't need peeling off the paper, or just cut around the design on the paper!
Better luck next time.