A few months ago I was asked to do a birthday cake for the 29th of January and I was given a picture of what was wanted. It was a beautiful cake, covered in blue plastic icing with a layers of plastic icing creating a picture of a horse along with flowers, polka dots and a scroll with the child’s name on it. Needless to say I grabbed at the opportunity to try something like this knowing that it would definitely be pushing my creative boundary.

The result:

For the cake I used the German Chocolate cake with a milk chocolate ganache, that was the easy part.

I have a wonderful husband who used his magic computer skills to take the original picture, angle it so it was flat on, outline it and print out only the outlines so that I could easily use these as a stencil to get the picture as accurate as possible.

The part that I was most concerned about was the writing and detail that was done in black. I knew that I could get black gel colouring, but I didn’t think that this would be the easiest thing to work with for this detail. I was really hoping that someone would have a black icing pen or something that I could use to write onto plastic icing, but the baking shops were empty of inspiration for this. Thankfully we live in a society and are surrounded by people who have all had different experiences.

I was chatting about this to a friend of mine, Louise, and she mentioned that, when she was young, her grandmother would ice the Christmas cake with plastic icing and then bring it over to them along with Non-toxic koki pens and they happily drew pictures on and coloured the plastic icing. Yes! Great idea, one problem…not every shop sells non-toxic pens. I finally found some at Pick n Pay on Saturday morning which was a huge relief and turned out to be the easiest option. Thank you Louise!

I first created a word document with the writing and font that I wanted, printed it out in the size that I wanted and had this directly above the plastic icing scroll so that I could copy as closely as possible (this was before I out the scroll on the cake).  Mission accomplished!

I used left over royal icing (from the shell border) to attach the polka dots on the sides and the cake was safely delivered on Saturday to a very happy young lady. Yay!!