It'll all end in Tiers ~ In This Case A Two Tiered 25th Wedding Anniverary Cake

25 years marriage is certainly worth celebrating, and Edward and Noreen wanted a cake befitting the occasion for the party. Noreen knew she wanted a 2 tier sponge cake incorporating the theme of the party ~ silver hearts ~ so it was up to me to come up with a few cake designs. We looked at various options and eventually settled on a 12" base cake for the first tier and a an 8" heart shaped cake for the second tier, cut so it sloped down at an angle towards the base cake. The face of the heart cake then provided the perfect frame for the inscription.

The cake is decorated with silver sugar paste hearts, but as sugar paste doesn't come in silver I had to colour some sugar paste light grey, then spray it with PME Pearl Edible Lustre Spray. This added enough sparkle to make the end result look silver. Silver ribbon was put around the base of the cake, and overlaid with piped white royal icing before being studded with silver balls. The final piece of decoration is a spray of silver sugar paste hearts jutting over the top of the heart cake. I'm pleased to say they loved it.

X Marks the Spot

Thank God for the internet. It means that when I get a request for an unfamilar cake subject I can look it up ~ which saves the whole looking blank and playing 20 questions thing.

So when an email request for a birthday cake in the style of the X-Box logo came through a few days ago that's exactly what I did, and 5 mins of googling later not only was I familiar with the X Box logo I was able to say 'no problem', one shiny silver and green domed cake coming right up.

It has to be said that sponge cake isn't the most forgiving material to sculpt, it's soft, springy and full of air - which makes it great to eat but not so easy to carve a smooth curve on - and the more you try the more cake you carve - which makes it perfectly possibly to lop off most of your cake in the search for perfection. The trick is to recognise this and use the other tools at your disposal to fill in the imperfections, namely buttericing and sugarpaste.

Think of buttericing as plaster and sugarpaste as wallpaper - the buttericing smooths out any lumps and bumps and the sugarpaste gives a uniform finish. For this cake I used a white sugarpaste and coloured in myself using a touch of black food colouring. As a tip it's easy to colour your own pastel colours in icing but for strong colours i.e black, deep blues, greens, reds etc it's worth buying the pre-coloured sugarpaste as otherwise, whilst you may end up with perfectly sculpted upper arms due to all the kneading you're unlikely to get an even colour in your icing.

The shiny silver finish to this cake was achieved by using a pearlised spray ~ they're available in most good cake decorating shops now and the ones I use are the PME Edible Lustre Sprays, they come in a whole range of colours and are great if you need to give anything a silver or gold finish.

For me, the best bit with any cake is seeing the recipients face when they see it for the first time, and it's especially great when they takes the time afterwards to say how much they enjoyed it, which is exactly what happened with this cake ~ only this being the 21st Century and social media being king the compliment didn't come by post but by twitter.