Commissioned for the birthday of a work colleague.

A two layer chocolate sponge, sandwiched with chocolate butter icing (and all the extra shapes ‘glued’ on with butter icing), carved into shape. Crumb coated with same icing and then covered in fondant.

It’s the first real shaped cake I’ve done that I’m really happy with (the only other ones being the corset cakes. The Great A’tuin was more modeling fondant). It’s not perfect, but I’ll only get that with plenty of practice.

I tried using chocolate sprinkles as hairs, but they slide off before I could press them in, so it ended up clumpy which didn’t look good, so the poor chap got shaved *grins*

The lighting on this picture looks good, it shows the nice skin tone I got (and it took me forever! My arms were aching after all that kneading!)

The flash washed the colour out in this one. As you can see my writing needs lots of practice but it’s legible which is a start. I even managed to get really nice black buttercream (start with chocolate and then add the colouring)

The large amount of offcuts means it’s been thoroughly tasted and approved of.

The Birthday Girl definitely approved