My Great Uncle Mart turned 94 this year! Pretty amazing going really and he's doing very well on it. My Dad's cousin organised a big family get-together and a bit of a birthday shin dig for him. There have been some sad losses this year in our family so it was nice to have a get-together for a nice occasion. I made the Spitfire (yes that's what it's meant to be) out of grey sugar paste mixed with Tylo powder. I mixed the powder in really well and left this to kind of activate for a few hours before using it to mould into the shape of the aircraft. I used a schematic drawing I found online and cut out the elliptical wing shape first. I then fashioned the fuselage out of paste and used some spaghetti to fix on and stabilize the whole tail section. It was tricky. Once the paste had hardened off I painted it to try and look Spitfire-ish and added the nose cone. I decided it was far too adventurous to attempt propellers, so I left it at that. I got some white food colouring, thinking that would be the best thing to add white detailing, but it was a bit rubbish. In the end, I let down some white dusting powder with an alcohol solution and that was much, much better! Everyone seemed to like the cake and, most important of all, Uncle was really chuffed. Bless him!
This cake was for some friends of friends as a commission for their farewell party. They've been over here for 10 years or so from Australia and they're headed home now. They've made lots of lovely friends here by all accounts and so they had a bit of a get-together to wish them well and show them they'll be very much missed here in the UK. This one was a chocolate cake with chocolate flavour Renshaws sugar paste. This looks quite leathery when it's applied to the cake and so is ideal both for flavour and for the texture and look of it. I made this old fashioned suit case and had some flags printed on icing (much the same as the birthday cake I made for Alix a couple of years ago, only a smaller, simplified version.)