I have been terribly remiss in my blogging recently so will be making up for it over the next few days with a plethora of posts. I held back on this particular post as I was promised official pictures from the organisers which would undoubtedly be better than mine, but as they are taking so long I decided to just blog my rubbish pics anyway and do a follow-up post with the good stuff!

Last month I spent a brilliant 5 days on the Truly Scrumptious intensive cake decorating course learning all sorts of neat little tricks and making three brilliant cakes. I came home every evening exhausted and starving and woke up every morning excited to get back to it. It really was intensive, but that’s exactly what I want from this sort of course, especially for this sort of money! The instructor, Paul, was fantastic and really easy to get along with and I think I was really lucky with my classmates for the week. We somehow managed to work really hard while giggling uncontrollably. I really recommend this course to anyone thinking about doing something similar. There are all sorts of little things that a professional cake decorator does that can save you time and effort when creating perfect cakes and I got much more out of the ‘simple’ things we did than the making of the mad huge things. Now, on to the cakes!

The first cake we made was the 3-tier chocolate wrap:

This impressive giant is made from chocolate cake, dark chocolate ganache, and lots and lots of chocofrom! I had a lot of fun making the chocolate roses and sparkly deely boppers for this piece!

The second cake we finished was the lion’s head:

When I read the course description, this is the cake that I thought I would get the least out of. I could not have been more wrong. Not only was it full of neat little tricks and skills but the finished cake was by far the most fun looking!

The last cake we made was the Jimmy Choo:

This cake involved a lot of painstaking smoothing of ganache to get that neat rectangular finish but it was well worth it. While the design may not be to my particular taste, the techniques involved were invaluable.

So, at the end of the week I came home happy, excited and with three huge cakes. What to do! Looking at the lion’s growling mug, it was obvious to me where he should go. Straight to the Edinburgh Capitals to raffle off to raise funds for the team! At the last home game of the season Scott Neil was happy to take it off my hands and Paws delighted to see his mini-me come through the door! I even got to stand on the home ice to hand the cake over to the winner of the raffle!

Thanks to Ian Millar for the second picture!

Now for the big chocolate cake! My husband knew of a cake sale and origami event being held at the informatics forum to benefit the Red Cross efforts in Japan so I donated the cake for another raffle. By the end of the day the event had made over £1700 for the relief efforts and the raffle accounted for 10% of the total funds raised!

That just left one cake to be distributed to friends and family. Not a crumb was left!