Thirty years of cake

Last weekend Colin and I both turned 30! We had a lovely celebration with many family and friends, and even the torrential rain that poured ALL DAY didn't spoil it. (I don't suppose you can plan a barbecue in Scotland without preparing for the possibility of rain!) 

However, this post isn't really about the party. It's about one of my favourite substances. CAKE! 

On the Thursday before the birthdays I headed up to Jaqi and Dunk's house armed with all my decorating equipment, and set about making a duplicate of Colin's Nikon D200 camera. 

Unfortunately the Royal Mail failed us all big-style recently, and I ended up without several decorating tools that I had ordered in plenty of time to make the cake a bit more fancy, but I think I got by ok without them in the end.

The finished result

One for comparison! 

And another...

Jaqi very kindly did the baking of the cakes so that Colin didn't get suspicious, and so I ended up with the choice between a delicious chocolate cake and a Madeira cake to model with. In the end I covered the chocolate cake with the orange fondant (Colin's favourite colour of course!) and used the lovely moist Madeira to carve the camera out of. I cheated slightly and used a shop bought swiss roll for the camera lens, as I wasn't sure whether carved cake would hold the shape of a cylinder well enough! 

To make the lens, I used a round piece of fondant with silver swirls painted on, then covered it in cling film to make it shiny. One of the things I had ordered was confectioners glaze, which I'm told makes fondant shiny as if it's made of glass/shiny plastic, and I'd hoped to use this on the lens, and the display area on top and on the back. But because of her majesty's postal service, I guess we'll never know whether it would have worked out. (Not that I'm annoyed with them or anything...)

Back view

It was a shame that the majority of the detail on a camera is at the back, so I don't think many people at the party actually got a close look at it, so here's a snap for the blog readers. The picture is printed on edible icing, which was sent to me from a lovely little online shop called Photocake Occasion. I was delighted with it as I think it made the camera go from cake, to semi-realistic! 


I had planned to make the Nikon strap out of fondant too, and have it artistically draped around the front of the base cake... but after starting work at 11am, by 5pm I was exhausted and had also run out of fondant, so I wasn't really up for trekking to Sainsbury's to buy more! So Jaqi suggested using another photo and putting it into a fondant frame at the front of the camera to add a bit more detail. And I am pleased with the result! It's a cake I'd like to try again at some point to see if I could get the detail even more realistic, but I'll have to wait another year for Colin's birthday to come round again. Also, I never thought I'd say this, but I am fed up with eating cake, as we appear to have more cake than regular food in the fridge at the moment!