After gaining some confidence carving cakes and watching far too much 'Cake Boss', I was feeling ambitious as Steve's 40th birthday approached and decided to make him a bass guitar cake as he would be playing bass at his birthday gig.

This cake was constructed from five sheet cakes and was so big I had to buy a custom cake board for it! 

To create the shape I used a template made by Mr Chris. He printed a picture of the bass guitar I wanted to copy and drew a grid over the top. He then drew a larger grid on to paper the size of my sheet cakes, and copied each square across to draw a bigger picture of the guitar. 

I carved the cake before filling it to avoid the layers sliding as I cut them.










The downside with a cake this large is that it doesn't fit in my freezer. Although I could chill the sheet cakes individually before carving, when it came to my crumb coat the cake was at room temperature and the head of the guitar was really tricky to cover. It crumbled a lot as I tried to ice it and as a result lost some of its shape.





There's definitely room for improvement - the strings could be better, the cake board should be covered and I need to invest in a steamer to add a nice shine to the fondant but it's not bad for a first. I was especially happy with how the wood effect turned out. This is just brown food colouring diluted with some vodka and brushed on to the fondant. The vodka evaporates so it doesn't add any flavour to the cake.

Hopefully, if I've done a good enough job, any Primus, Les Claypool or Carl Thompson fans will recognise this bass ;)

If I pop to the supermarket for lunch I can't resist picking up a pack of peanut butter cups. This didn't go unnoticed by my colleague who also shares a love of all things peanut buttery. 

As peanut butter cupcakes has been on my "to bake" list for a while, I promised I'd bring some in to work whenever I eventually got round to making them. Then Mr Dutton handed in his notice and brought that day forward.


These have peanut butter in the sponge, peanut butter in the buttercream icing and are topped off with a little slice of a peanut butter cup. I felt they could have had more peanut butter but I probably love peanut butter more then the average person.


Dutton, if there's any chance you're reading this, I hope all is going well in your new job. You haven't been replaced yet and by that I mean there is no one to lower the tone quite like you did. Thorn :)