70th Birthday Cake

Heatwaves and cakes don't mix very well.

8 days of temperatures in the high 30s and 40s meant that I stayed up until 3.45am on the morning that the cake was being picked up just so the whole thing didn't melt.  We have air-conditioning, but I found that the fondant dried out really quickly, so I had to re-do the lettering numerous times for it to even be legible.  Luckily they wanted the cake covered in buttercream rather than fondant, so I didn't have to work out how to deal with a whole cake of dried out fondant! The buttercream set really quickly, so the finish wasn't quite as smooth as I would have liked.  It tasted good though, so that's the main thing.

This was a big chocolate mud-cake - so big that it didn't fit in my oven.  I decided to make two separate 30cm x 30cm cakes and then join one-and-a-half of them together.  I used the rest for our New Years' Eve dessert.  It took quite a bit of problem-solving to work out how to fit both of them in our fridge with all of the rest of our post-Christmas food. Just as well I'm good at Tetris :)

Wishing you all a happy 2013.  I still have a back-log of cakes to show you from 2012, so hopefully I will post about them soon.

-N-