I’ve been making and decorating two celebration cakes over the last few weeks, the first one was collected last night…

A colleague from work asked me to make a cake for her parents diamond wedding anniversary…sixty years!!! my OH and I will hopefully get to ruby, golden if we’re very lucky, but no chance of diamond!

Anyway, I digress…the problem with diamond celebrations is what colour theme do you use? I decided on creamy white and lavender with a few sparkles added.

I made a 9″ hexagonal rich fruit cake. Here is the UK it is our traditional celebration cake, it needs to be made ideally at least 6 weeks before the event so it can mature. A cake this size has about 3lb of dried fruit (currents, sultanas, raisins and mixed peel) all soaked in your tipple of choice (I use brandy) 7 eggs, 1lb soft dark brown sugar…it takes about 4-5 hours to bake. The big advantage from a cake decorators point of view is that it can be decorated a couple of weeks before, you can take your time to get it right!

A couple of weeks ago I covered it in marzipan and sugarpaste icing, all that was left was a bit of icing and the decoration.

As I was making flowers for a wedding cake I decided I would make enough roses for both cakes at the same time. I spent a pleasant afternoon making about fifteen roses from flowerpaste. I love using flowerpaste, it should be rolled out so thin you can read print through it, that’s what makes the flowers look so delicate, yet they are actually pretty strong.

Roses look best if the centre layers are in a slightly darker shade than the outer petals. Unfortunately I rather over did the colour so they came out a lot more creamy than I wanted. This was fine for the diamond cake, but too creamy for the wedding cake.

I was in Otley a couple of weeks ago trying to buy what I would call a pick, a wired cluster of beads which I could use to add some sparkle to the arrangement. One shop had some but they were like £5 each and I would have needed three!! I popped into a new florist/coffee shop that’s just opened and described what I wanted. The first ones she appeared with were like pins with diamonds on the end, lovely but not what I was after. She searched her back room again and came back with three silver and pearl sprays, perfect for what I wanted. She insisted on giving me them as she wasn’t going to use them anyway. I thought I could buy some of the diamond pins (then at least I’m buying something!) I asked for five…she wouldn’t let me pay for those either!!! my mother and I now use the coffee shop for our regular meets so at least I can put something back!!

Last week I spent an afternoon putting the cake together…

I arranged five roses, some filler flowers and the pearl sprays into a little corsage, using florists tape to secure them together, I added green ribbon loops to give the inference of leaves and then wrapped the stem with purple ribbon leaving long tails to drape over the cake.

I secured some wide ribbon around the sides and suddenly had the idea to use the diamond pins in the centre of each side (OK so I only have five, I missed the back out!) It looked pretty and helped to hold the ribbon against the cake.

I piped the couples names on the top and the date of their wedding and the cake was complete. Jill came round to collect it last night and she loves it!

…just got the wedding cakes to sort out now!