Surfboard cake

As a little kid my mother would always let us look through the good old fashioned Women’s Weekly Cake book and pick at our birthday cake.  The state of this book is very well worn with batter dropped throughout, pages turned and some pages even fallingout.  Children’s birthday cakes since this time seem to have grown with the technological age (along with everything else). Women’s Weekly even has an updated version of their Children’s Birthday Cake book.

For me – well I started out by making my cousins birthday cakes six years ago and since then I have tried to keep up the evolving world of cake decorating.  So 6 years on and my cousin just had her 8th birthday.  I gave her the cake books, the internet but she was (for the first time ever) at a loss for ideas of what she actually wanted!  She was having a surfing party with some of her little friends so I decided I would make her a surf board cake. 

I made the cake approximately a week out using the attached recipe.  I used a roasting tin (big rectangular one) to cook the cake in.  Just be careful when making large quantities of cakes that you don’t let it burn.  But the recipe I have attached isvery fool proof.  It doesn’t rise too much either which is incredible when trying to decorate them later on – saves all the trimming.  After making the cake I put it in the freezer until closer to the time.

I found a template of a surfboard and made this in to A3 size before transferring it on to baking paper.  Two days out from her birthday I cut the cake whilst frozen (as it is so much easier to cut) using the template.  I then covered the cake in chocolate ganache (see attached recipe) and put it back in the freezer.  The next day was F day! (Fondant Day).  Of course it had to be so hot and humid.  But I rolled out the fondant on baking paper using cornflour to size and put it over the cake.  (see attached re rolling fondant ) I used pink sherbet strap to replicate the wood down the surfboard and crushed shortbread biscuits and brown sugar together to make sand.  For the fins – I just tinted the fondant and my boyfriend enjoyed modelling these.

This is the finished product:

View the receipe here!

I will attach some photos of the cakes and how I made each of them dating back over the years.