I've recently been on a holiday back home to Australia for 5 weeks. While I was there I learnt so many new cake skills. I learnt how to wire flowers and create flower sprays by taking a Moth Orchid course and in turn learnt the basics of Gum paste and how to work with it and make it myself from scratch.
I took a class on how to make Zoo Animals, moulding a giraffe, panda and monkey from fondant. As a result I can now make any basic animal sitting up - can't wait to get a jungle themed cake to make!
Finally I took one last class on how to cover a chocolate cake in ganache to then cover in fondant and create a fondant ribbon.
I took so many things away from all of these classes to then come home to an order from a friends husband for a small surprise birthday cake. After I enquired what theme etc. I was given two stipulations. 1. It MUST be chocolate and 2. It has to have "Happy Birthday" on the cake. Other then those two requirments, I was free to do what I wished. So I charged mates rates for a small cake and decided to make my first ever topsy turvy cake.
I did a bit of research on what designs to do and finally decided to use some of the skills I learnt in Australia and came up with a 2 tiered cake. I decided to start with a cake board covered in Fondant with Happy Birthday on that. Then the first tier I made a simple pink with some flowers scattered across it.
The top tier I wanted to finish with a loop ribbon to represent a gift box, so thought I would do the strips up the side too.
The one twist to this whole order, was that I was going to be one of the guests at the dinner. This is the first time I've made a cake for a customer to then be present for the tasting. It was really quiet scary!!
At the end of the day though, the cake came out beautifully and tasted better then I expected. I guess you can judge how it turned out for yourself by checking out the pictures!! ;)
