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...

Cathedrals and Minsters

Cathedrals have always been in the business of getting people to visit them. Back in the Middle Ages, saints' relics were a big draw, as was having the very latest in pointy Gothic architecture. These days, they host concerts, invite you to experience the sun or moon , and have cafes in the cloisters. moon at Lichfield Cathedral One of the latest wheezes from the Association of English Cathedrals is the Pilgrim Passport . This neat blue booklet enables you to collect stamps from each cathedral you visit. Sucked in by the idea of pilgrimage and the prospect of yet another tick-list to complete, I purchased a passport and set out. My first job was to review the list. There are 42 English cathedrals, not including Westminster Abbey (which is a Royal Peculiar) and Peel Cathedral on the Isle of Man. Wales has six, and Scotland technically has none, as its church has no bishops.  For some reason I was also interested in minsters, which is a more nebulous category. Originally the word mea...

Bradford Cathedral: A marvel in miniature

My family think it's hilarious. I seem to have a gift for finding people who are doing weird and wonderful things. Cycling across all the OS maps in the UK ( Mark Wedgwood ). Going to Rome on a 50cc moped called Rocinante ( Chris Webb) . Walking 3700 miles in Wales to raise awareness of ovarian cancer ( Ursula Martin )  And building a scale model of Bradford Cathedral ( Michael Scott ). Michael Scott's main hobby is constructing an N-scale railway layout of a fictional West Yorkshire town called Chandwell. I forget how I first found his YouTube channel; I think it was shortly before Bradford Cathedral asked if he would turn his talents to producing a model of the building, as part of Bradford's year as City of Culture. He said yes, thinking it would take about nine months. Two years and many fascinating videos later, he finally unveiled the finished artwork at the cathedral. I had to be there. It helped that Graham's sister and brother-in-law live just outside Bradford...