My Old Man's Birthday - done!

Last week was the culmination of all the weeks of mental prep that went into making my dad's 65th birthday cake. I have to admit, I did leave it a tad on the late side. Though in my defence, I couldn't really do much until the end of the week unless we wanted stale or mouldy cake! But as I was anxiously staring at the oven door on Thursday afternoon, desperately hoping that this time it wasn't going to sink like the Titanic there was a little bit of panic beginning to creep in.

In the end the sponge cakes were fine. If anyone needs to know, to make a victoria cake of 26cm width it takes an 8 egg mixture. I still swear by Hugh F-W's recipe of weight for weight, but using 4 eggs per sandwich used about 10oz of flour/fat/sugar. I made the mixture in 2 batches of 4 eggs. The main reason being in case I ballsed it all up, if you have 2 sandwich tins of 26cm and feel brave, then, hell, go for the 8!

The icing of the cake was a bit of a challenge too. I knew what I wanted to acheive but did have to change my plans when the fondant didn't want to do what I wanted it to do, ie lie straight on the sides. Of course the observant amongst you will immediately recognise my problem. I was icing a sandwich cake, not a fruit on, and of course they naturally don't have rod straight sides. But a bit of imagination but that one right. It wasn't flawless, and I'm sure that mr Goldman isn't exactly quaking in his boots, but I was quite happy with the results:

As for the card, well of course I had to make that as well. But I was much less organised (no, really!) and I don't really have a lot of *manly* stuff in my craft stash (will have to address that) so I resorted to the leftover watch parts and some more masculine style paper. I haven't asked dad what he thought of the card yet!

That's it for me on the cake front for a while I think. Caoimhe keeps telling everyone that I am making her birthday cake for her, but we have 5 months to go before that. She'll forget, won't she? Surely??