Skip to main content

Car on a cake

It's unusual that Graham makes requests for his birthday.  But for this one he asked if I could make a birthday cake with a picture of Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes on it.  (He's not especially a Lewis Hamilton fan, it's just that the Mercedes happens to have a big number 44 on it.  Guess how old he was this birthday!)  Now, drawing racing cars is not my particular forte, but you know, since he's my husband and all, I figured I'd have a go.

There are plenty of pictures out there, of course: a quick Google Images search turned up this one, and I sat down to try and transcribe it onto paper.  My pencil drawing came out well enough that I felt able to carry on - at least, it looked roughly like a Formula 1 car and the perspective wasn't completely screwed up.


The cake was a simple sponge cake.  I marzipanned and iced it, and set to work.  With the drawing in hand, cutting out the shapes in fondant was relatively simple, as I could trace the lines onto the icing with the point of a knife.  Then it was just a matter of jigsawing them all together, and adding a few lines of detail.  There were a few more things I could have added if it hadn't been getting rather late; and really, the 44 would have been better piped if I'd had some writing icing handy.  But anyone who watches F1 could tell that was Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes, right?


And here's my crazy boys celebrating Graham's birthday!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Laid-back Lille and Bustling Brussels

After a night in a tiny AirBnB in Canterbury , where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later. Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.  In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place call...

California: Beside the Sea

What comes to mind when you think of California?  Surfing!  So we strapped Toby to a surfboard and pushed him out to sea... Actually, it's pretty difficult to engage in watersports when holidaying with a toddler.  Sometimes it feels like it's pretty difficult to do anything when holidaying with a toddler!  But one thing they do tend to enjoy is getting lovely and wet and sandy.  So a beach is a good place to be. Toby was delighted to discover an apparently endless sandbox, and amused us by running in circles, rolling around and even acquiring a sand goatee!  His favourite game was for Graham to bury a small ball in the sand so that he could dig it up again. One of the most relaxing afternoons we had was at Goleta Beach Park, just north of Santa Barbara, where we were staying.  The air was cool but the sand was pleasantly warm, and the sky was partly cloudy, helping to mitigate the panicked impulse to slather on as much sunscreen as possi...