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 ;)