29/9/12 - Ravnicake

While my main hobbies are making cake and sewiing and girly things, Mr Marzipan (as I call the husband) is a big geek. One of his hobbies is playing Magic: the Gathering and last year he persuaded me to come to the prerelease event for the new set (they release four new sets of cards a year and a week before the release of each set there is a 'pre release' event where you can play ing a tournament building a deck using the new cards). Anyway a year later I'm addicted to playing Magic quite a lot. We were looking forward to the release of the new set 'Return to Ravnica' (Ravnica being the setting for a previous set of cards a few years ago). Anyway one day i was talking about how I like making cake and someone suggested I make a cake for the prerelease event. I'm not sure they were actually expecting me to make one!

Final cake

 The design was based on the art for one of the cards in the set, Tablet of the Guilds, which they were using for advertising prior to the release of the set. The main theme of Ravnica is that it is a city dominated by ten guilds which each use two of the five colours of mana for their magic. Five of the guilds are in this set, and the other five will be in the set which is released in the new year.
I decided to put the symbol for each of the five guilds around the edge of the cake, but how to make the symbols look good (I'm no good at freehand drawing with icing!)
I got the images for each of the five guilds from the website for this set , GuildsofRavnica.com and I used paint.net image editing software to turn the art into a black and white stencil image. I traced the outline of the symbols from the stencil onto the circles of sugarpaste icing with the end of a pin, and I used the outline to help me draw the symbols with writing icing.

Guild

Colour image

Black & white stencil

Final icing

Rakdos - black and red

Selesnya - green and white

Izzet - red and blue

Golgari - green and black

Azorius - blue and white

All final icing symbols

The cake itself was also important, as brian who organises the tournament can't eat gluten so I needed to make a gluten-free cake so that he could eat some too. My chocolate and tea leaf cake is gluten free, but I've made so many chocolate cakes lately I wanted to make a plain sponge as it would be easier to ice as well. I found a recipe for Orange and Almond cake which seemed tasty and not too complicated, so I decided to make that. I made the guild symbols while the oranges were boiling and the cake was baking, and then in the morning I made some buttercream to spread over the top of the cake.

Cake with buttercream swirled over the top

Final cake with symbols on it

Everyone said it was super tasty! The only problem was I couldn't cut it into more than 16 slices, and there were about 40 people there. Luckily by the end most people had already eaten lots of food in between rounds so I think the people that wanted some got some! The next challenge is to make one with less sugar in for the diabetic gamers...

ETA: Copyright information 
Magic: the Gathering® and Return to Ravnica™ are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other countries.
All guild symbols are copyright © 2012 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

16/9/12 - A cake with a name

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)