Military cakes

Attention! By the left, eat cake!

The military cake project turned out to be great fun. Here's the resulting cakes, taking pride of place at the birthday bash.

The main cake was designed by my other half and he made the soldier and the rifle. I think he had fun and it was lovely to sit down as a family and make the toppings for our cakes. Even baby puddle duck got involved!

The cake itself is Victoria sponge covered in a crumb coating, before being topped with icing using the grass nozzle (still my favourite).

The tent is a cake cooked in a small loaf tin, frozen, trimmed to shape before a crumb coating. I then created a camouflage design by rolling out green icing leaving it quite thick, placing black and brown patches of icing on top and then rolling the whole thing out again. I put a square triangle of black icing at the front and back of the tent and when the camouflage icing was draped over the tent shape, I created a little 'door' at the front and trimmed the excess 'canvas'.

I then placed the tent on top of the cake and added the grass. (Please ignore the messy work station in pic above - as posted before I have the tiniest kitchen in the world and end up working on top of myself most of the time!)

The cake looked a bit bare at this stage, so I used some of the sponge that I had trimmed from the tent shape cake and created little mounds on the cake board which I then covered in a crumb coating and iced grass on top. I also iced a little grass for the rifle to sit on as it got a little bit lost on the cake board which had been covered in chocolate icing before mixing a little of the green icing in too to add texture. This was all applied pretty roughly with a spatula.

After I'd iced the cake and topped with the tent, I didn't really know where to put the soldier and his rifle and backpack. I ended up just putting him by the side of the cake / tent and giving him a little fire to keep warm. This was made from chocolate strands for the wood (fairly cheap from Morrison's) and some citrus strands for the fire.

These cupcakes are described in a separate blogpost as wanted to give them their own post they are so special!

I've also done another post on camouflage sponge cake.