Uncle John rambles to his 60th

I was going to write about the cake I have just made.  But that cake, needs THIS cake to kind of start the thread.

Sometime ago, I became Facebook friends with my mother's cousin's daughter, Ali (I think that makes her my 3rd cousin, but I get so confused with these 1st, 2nds, once-removeds, never-darken-this-doorstep-again-ds, one-who-shall-never-more-be-name-ds etc. it all becomes a bit of a blur!)  For ease, her parents have always been Uncle and Aunt, and she's just Cousin!  We don't see each other terribly often, so she wandered through my photographs and stumbled upon my album of cakes I have made since I started dabbling with them sometime in the mid-90s.  (I've been considering putting more of them up here so you can all have a look.  Perhaps one day I'll get around to them … but don't hold your breath eh!) 

Uncle John's 60th birthday was coming up.  Before she knew about my cake-making abilities, she and her mother had arranged for a lady to make the cake.  Then, tragically, the week prior to the party, the woman's mother died suddenly.  Now, of course, she had a funeral to organise and wouldn't have time for the cake.  Ali called me in a panic to see if I would be able to make a cake.  I said I probably could.

There are a few questions I ask when people want cakes: When do you want it?  What type of cake – fruit or sponge?  Elaborate or novelty?  What occasion is it for?  Do they have something particular in mind?  If not, does the person have a hobby or career that could be used as the theme of the cake?  Uncle John is a bus driver who loves walking.  So she and her mother thought maybe a rambling theme.  Now that was the point at which I panicked.  A bus I could have easily put together – I have a vast collection of cake books and one of the cakes is a lovely double-decker red London bus.  I could have copied that with my eyes closed … well, no, perhaps not quite, but I'm sure you get my drift.  A rambler was not amongst my Here's-Something-I-Made-Earlier-So-You-Can-Copy-It books, so I was going to have to invent something.  However, after I'd panicked for a couple of days, I calmed down.  I remembered a golfing cake which I thought I could adapt.  And so I set to. 

Now there are a few things a cake-maker needs in order to produce little masterpieces: fresh ingredients, basic equipment, no kids around to "help" create … John's cake, however, was needed at the end of a half-term. So my entire creation time was going to be done WITH the children around.  I suppose I could have made the cake during the evenings when they were asleep, but I didn't want to limit myself to just that time, so I had to think of something they could do to "help".  I figured the least dangerous thing they could make was leaves and flowers.  This is what we did.  I wasn't going to put them in originally, but actually, I think they worked rather well.  There were a LOT more flowers and leaves, but I felt this was really enough for a woodland log!!! 

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For the grass, I coloured some dessicated coconut with green food dye. All the other icing was sugarpaste (fondant icing) which is great for moulding stuff.  The chap is sitting leaning against a log, with a sandwich in his hand, a satchel next to him and his walking stick on the ground next to him.  He's wearing a floppy hat to keep his balding head safe from the sun.  I had a moment of panic on the Friday night because I wasn't sure if Uncle John still had his beard.  I instantly facebooked a message to Ali to check, holding off painting that on until she'd replied.  We had a teensy disaster when the Footpath sign fell over and broke and I had to glue it back together as I'd run out of time to make another. To keep the sign from falling over again, I had to glue dried spaghetti to the back of it!!  Oh yes, and I added my little butterfly.  I try to sneak one in to all my cakes – kind of like a signature ;)  Here's another view of it.

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I was really quite pleased with the result; and when Ali and Aunt Janet came to collect it, they were delighted.  What I could never have known, is that Uncle John wears a floppy hat on his walks, has a walking stick and carries a satchel with his sandwiches in.  I confess, I preened. 

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