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!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ten books that shaped my life

Ten books that shaped my life in some way.  Now that wasn't a problem.  I scanned the bookshelves and picked out nine favourites without the slightest difficulty (the tenth took a little longer). The problem was that, on the Facebook challenge, I wasn't supposed to explain why .  Nope.  Having picked out my ten, I couldn't let them go without saying why they were special to me. These books are more than a collection of words by an author.  They are particular editions of those words - taped-up, egg-stained, dust-jacketless and battered - which have come into my life, been carried around to different homes, and become part of who I am. How to Be a Domestic Goddess Well, every woman needs an instruction manual, doesn't she? Nigella's recipes mean lazy Saturday mornings eating pancakes, comforting crumbles on a rainy night, Christmas cakes, savoury onion pies and mounds of bread dough.  If you avoid the occasional extravagance (20 mini Bundt tins...
3 comments
Read more

Erewash Valley Trail: Stapleford

It had been a long wait for this walk. All through the Christmas holidays, and an inset day, and weeks and weeks of appalling weather. Now it was the end of January and there was still a dull grey layer of cloud, but at least it wasn't raining. I set out. If you like a good ex-industrial landscape, the Erewash Valley is the place to be. It is veined with old canals and railways, freckled with former factories and mills, and pitted with coal mines. The M1 and a railway run north to south through it, but parts of it still feel surprisingly rural. I had been drawn in by all that there was to discover, so I'd shelved the Portway for a little while and diverted onto the Erewash Valley Trail. I parked in Bramcote Hills Park again and had a quick look at the walled garden, overlooked by the  Hemlock Stone. Hickings Lane heads towards the centre of Stapleford. It looks like it should be a dual carriageway but it's not; there are two separate roads with a wide grass strip between th...
Post a Comment
Read more