This cake I made for my Aunt's 60th birthday party. It is the biggest cake I have made! The base board measured 20" x 18" and once it was fully decorated it was very heavy!
To start making this cake I first had to measure the boot of my Mum's car, to make sure that it would actually fit inside! Once I knew how big I could have the board I then knew how much cake I needed to bake.
I didn't want to try and male one large cake (it would not have fitted inside my oven for starters!) so I choose to make 4 cakes which I could put together. I also drew out a large 6 and 0 to fit onto the board and I cut around them. These became my templates.
Here is a picture. I had already levelled the cakes at this point (using the leveller on the top of them!) and you can see the off cuts in the plastic box.
Just to give you an idea how large it was, here is a picture with my hand (to show the scale).
Next I put the cakes onto the board, laid the number template on top and cut around them. I did one number at a time as I would not have been able to cut around the 6 if the cakes for the 0 has also been on the board as there would have been no room! Once they were cut out I covered both in a crumb coat of buttercream.
The next thing to do was add a layer of sugarpaste (or rolled icing, or fondant, whatever you prefer to call it!). I coloured mine green for the grass colour of the garden. I knew I would not be able to cover this in one big layer so instead I rolled strips out and covered the edges first.
Then, using my templates, I cut out a 6 and a 0 for the top.
I used a small paint brush and wetted the edges of the sugarpaste (with water) to allow me to stick the bottom piece to the top piece. This meant the cake was now fully 'sealed'.
My next step was to make the fence around the edge. I used a mix of chocolate flavoured sugapaste and white (as I thought the chocolate on it's own was a bit too dark) with some CMC powder added. I rolled out small pieces, and using a a tree bark texture mat I embossed the sugarpaste to give it the wood look. Then I cut out individual fence panels and let them dry for a little while before sticking them onto the cake (using sugar glue). The reason I let them dry a little bit before hand, and added the CMC powder to the sugarpaste, was because I did not want the panels to bend at the top.
Then to finish I used flower moulds and daisy cutters to make lots of small flowers, and used other bits of sugarpaste to make vegetables and the earth for the flower beds and vegetable patch. The tomato plants were made using spaghetti as poles!
I have more close up pictures of the cake on my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.260473237439718.1073741847.153594251460951&type=1
So please pop over and say hi!
This cake took a long time to make, but it was a lot of fun and I was really happy with how it turned out. And, thankfully, so was my Aunt!
