This cake was made for a client of mine who has ordered a a few cakes for celebrations. This time she wanted a birthday cake for her daughter and friend who were having a joint cheer leading themed party.

You know, one of the brilliant things about my job is that it is not restricted purely to all things cake related. As with lots of the cakes I make I have learned something new. When my client told me what she wanted I had a vague idea in my head of pom poms and short skirts. That is the gist of it but it is a very serious business in America and teams spend a huge amount of money on outfits, logos, competing and generally out cheering each other.

I decided on making the sides of the cake look like the traditional cheer leading pleated skirt with striping. I did this by first dividing the cake into sections so that I would be able to place the skirt sections onto the cake.

Before applying these I painted the side of the tier with edible silver paint as this would be the layer underneath the skirt. Once this was done I added the skirt sections.

When they were done I began to add the stripes. these were done with strips of white sugarpaste which I painted with silver paint once stuck in place.

The next thing to do was the logo which included the initials of the birthday girls. I wanted a logo in keeping with the cheer-leading logos I found. I used word art to create the right shaped letters and then made templates to cut around.

I traced the All Stars part onto parchment paper and then marked this on the logo by pushing a pin through the parchment along the letter lines. This created pin pricks in the sugarpaste which I could then pipe over. I piped the letters in tiny beads to look like little diamantes or beads (these are a recurring theme in cheer leading logos along with stars).I piped them in white royal icing and then painted them silver.

I edged the logo with a purple strip and put a line of dinky silver stars along the bottom edge.

I had made the wired stars and pom poms at the beginning of the week so that they would harden. I made a hole in the centre of the cake for the wired arrangement to sit in. I used a hollow plastic dowel filled with marzipan which would fit into the hole and hold the wires firmly. the reason I use marzipan for these wired pieces is that it is much firmer than sugarpaste and holds the wired piece upright without any movement.

I think the cake has a real all American cheer leading look to it without being too cheesy.

This camper van cake was made for a friend as a surprise for her birthday celebration.

Her husband had to sneak out a pic of the van she used to have so that I could get a colour match and include the details on the original van including the number plate.

As I write this I can hear my son and his friend talking about chickens and the portal of power. This is what happens on a rainy day, they come in and talk (make that shout) rubbish. My husband has now joined in and can talk rubbish with the best of them.

Adults have to take the opportunity, whenever a Wii is mentioned to make a joke about wee. Eight year old boys either get very uptight about the fact that we are talking about the wrong thing or (more often) dismiss us as fools.

As always with any vehicle I made a plinth that the main part of the cake would sit on and be raised off the cake drum in order to make it look like it is supported by it’s wheels rather than squashing them.

I was going to mention that this is my unique (should be patented) method of acheiving a realistic look to vehicles but someone at the party asked if I had used this method so they must have seen it used by someone else (who probably saw it on Venus Cakes first!).

The height of the plinth needs to be half the diamter of the wheels so you will need to work out the size of your wheels before making this.

I made the plinth with polystyrene and then covered the outside with black sugarpaste so it ends up being as invisible as possible.

The main part of the cake which is the van itself has to sit on a thick cake board with cut out parts for the wheel arches. The cake for the van consisted of 3 and a half sandwich layers to acheive the height of the van (standard cakes have two sandwich layers). Once the layers were sandwiched together I did a bit of carving to shape the front of the van. I then covered the cake with marzipan.

Once the marzipan had hardened a little I could start covering the cake with sugarpaste. The great thing about vehicles is that they have panels and doors which means they can be done in sections rather than trying to cover the whole cake in one go. It would be easy to cover a simple shape in one go but creating markings on the cake for doors and windows would be more tricky.

The first thing to add was a thin covering of very dark grey sugarpaste around the top of the van where the windows would be. Once in place I used some shaped cards to push into this sugarpaste to create the outlines of the windows. These cards were  made in true Blue Peter fashion so that they were ready to use srtaight away while the black sugarpaste was still soft.

If you need to make these types of embossers you need to measure once the marzipan is in place to give you the most accurate lengths.

I worked out the sizes of the windows and cut out my embossers from thick card (the thickness of greeting cards is fine).

I also scribed all lines for door joins onto the marzipan so that I would have a guide for placing the green sugarpaste on.

Everyone with me so far? good.

The next thing was to add the sections of green sugarpaste and make little dips for door handles and lines for vents. Again ensure that any indents or shaping is done while the sugarpaste is still soft.

One of the tricky parts when adding the green sugarpaste was the rear wheel arches. This is because they are not a standard round wheel arch that comes above the wheel. They are lower and cover the top half of the wheel. I fould the easiest (when I say this I don’t mean easy peasy, I just mean the least difficult) way to do this was to cut out a piece of parchment paper the same size as the back section of the van and then to cut out the shape of the rear wheel arch from the paper. Once I had put the section of sugarpaste in place over the wheel I could thenplace the paper over the section carefully cut out the wheel arch from the sugarpaste.

Once all the green was done I could move onto the white top half of the van. I brushed a small amount of glue around the edges of the marked window frames and rolled out a long strip of white sugarpaste to place right along the length of the van. I scribed a vertical line between each window and then used the card embosser to cut out the window shape (I did not brush glue all over the dark grey sugarpaste so that the window shape I cut out would just pull away and leave no sticky mess behind)

I added the white triangle to the front of the van and scribed the VW sign onto this. I used very fine strips of green sugarpaste to make the sign. All of the finishing touches - lights, door handles and mirrors where made with white sugarpaste which I painted using silver lustre dust. The mirrors were supported with white wires.

The van roof was the last thing to go on and I roughly measured the top surface for the van to get the right size for the roof.

We gave the cake to Sally at her party and as we all guessed she would, she cried. Good crying though. Not the sort of crying you used to see on Changing rooms when Carol Smiley used to frog march terrified couples into their once ok lounge to reveal how the design team had turned it into a strip club/roller disco.

Anyway she loved her cake and it took her a couple of days to cut it.

This cake was made for a client of mine who has ordered several cakes from me. This time around she wanted a Peppa Pig cake for her daughter’s second birthday.

I had an email from my client a couple of weeks ago to ask if this cake would be on my website in the near future as she was looking forward to seeing it. I am glad she did actually because when I edited the pics in photoshop they looked lovely and also there is no harm in a little kick up the backside now and then.

She was pretty clear on what she wanted which included cupcakes, a top cake and the stand to be made to co ordinate with the design and colour scheme of the cake.

I began this cake by making the sugar hearts and numerals for the cupcakes. These were made using sugarpaste with gum tragacanth added. I did not roll these pieces too thin as they need to be farily substantial to be pushed into the butter cream swirls.

Note that numbers or letters should be added as near to delivery as possible as they can become soft when pushed into butter cream and then droop.

I always pipe the swirls onto cupcakes a few hours before delivery and then add numbers while the butter cream is still soft. Butter cream does not harden like royal icing but it does form a skin which will crack if anything is pushed into it once set.

Next was the stand. When I am making a stand to accomodate cupcakes I size it beforehand using cake drums and cupcake cases so that I can get the cupcakes onto the stand when the cake is complete.

Depending on the number of cupcakes and the overall desired look of the cake and stand it may not always be possible to get every cupcake onto the stand.

I always inform my clients of this to start with and it is not usually a problem as these extra cupcakes can just be served with the rest.

The type of stand I made for this cake was one which resembles a cake rather than the traditional looking cupcake stand.

This option is good because the stand forms what looks like two or three tiers of a cake and then the top cake finishes the tiers.

The stand was made in pink and yellow to match the colour scheme of the cupcakes and top cake.

The top cake has a circle in the centre with the heads of Peppa and George looking happy - as they always do and the circle is framed with dinky blossoms.

The cupcakes were decorated with piped butter cream swirls with number two’s, hearts and edible sugar crystals.

I love the pretty colours and clean look of this cake.

This numeral cake can be made in any colour combination with the greeting of your choice.

It is also possible to have two different flavours in each number.

This cake was for a wedding in December and had a wintry feel to it. It also had hundreds of berries and leaves wired together to create sweeping decorations around two of the four tiers.

As you can probably guess I began this cake by making the many many berries and leaves needed. These all needed to be wired. This was the most time consuming part of the decoration and I watched lots of episodes of Peep Show and then lots of episodes of Black Books.

The berries are a mixture of red, gold and blush pink. Once rolled and threaded onto the wires I left them to harden for a few days.

It is good to have an idea of the number of berries or flowers for example you will need and then make more.

When you have to make a wired display you want to ensure that you have enough to make it look plentiful and full rather than sparse.

After the berries I made all the leaves.

As with all the things that I need to make lots of I got myself set up with everything I would need and set up my production line.

The great thing about making leaves or any simple item like them is that although it takes a long time it does not require a huge amount of concentration to get them right so you can get yourself comfy and then put a film on or rope someone else into helping you and then have a good old chin wag.

When the berries were all hardened I gave the red and pink ones a coating of glaze with glitter added to give them a lovely winter sparkle. I used lustre dust to colour the gold berries.

Once I was sure that I had enough berries and leaves I could begin to wire them together.

When wiring a length of pieces rather than a cluster shape you need to begin with the end of the strip and not the start of the branch.

This is so that by the time you have wired everything together the thicker part of the strip will be at the base where it sits in the cake and not at the tip. The same way as you would see it in nature.

It is also much easier to work away from what you are doing so that the florist tape does not get tangled up. Hope that all makes sense. I am sure that those of you who have made wired floral displays will know what I mean.

When making the two wired lengths of berries I first used a single wire against the side of the tier to measure how long I would need to make each trail of berries. It was then just a case of adding berries, leaves and gypsophila until the display was long enough.

Now neither of these pieces was very long but it took a surprising amount of time to complete them. This is because the display has to be full and plentiful, and because of this it takes time to build up every small section of the display.

When both displays were done I put them to one side while I did the piping details. I made a template using parchment paper and scribed the piping line onto the side of the tiers with piping detail. I made some caramel coloured royal icing for the piping.

I chose this colour because the piping would eventually be gold. It is not possible to make nice looking gold royal icing by colouring it as you would any other colour. Therefore it has to be painted with gold lustre dust. A piped line is a thin surface to paint and I do not paint right up to the surface of the cake to avoid marking the cake with gold paint. If the royal icing was white any little gaps would be very obvious but with caramel piping, the tiny gap I leave near the cake surface does not show.

The piping detail included little bunches of grapes with leaves at the top of each bunch.

I love the way the berries glistened but were not blingy or too sparkly.