Piles of money, this was the theme of the cake requested for this customer’s lucky recipient – and not just any old money, but edited notes for a 70th birthday – this meant £70 notes, with the name of bank matching the surname of the “birthday boy”, being printed onto an edible “paper”.

I delegated the editing job to my partner, but it turns out that editing money isn’t as simple as you might think – firstly the notes are made hard to reproduce for obvious reasons, and so the number of changes needing to be made seemed to multiply! It was based on a £50 note initially, and there are a number of miniature “50″s throughout the note itself, if you study one closely you will be able to see.

Even once all the changes were made, it was still determined to be difficult, as we learnt that there are inbuilt markers designed to be picked up by printers to recognise that you are attempting to print a bank note – the result being a lot of half-notes because as soon as the printer got to these markers it stopped printing! Two different people tried to print the notes for me, with the same result, and after research we discovered that only printers made before 2005 would be likely to be able to print them. Luckily I found one locally (phew!) and to my relief they easily printed the design onto icing sheets for me.

After that, the rest of the process was relatively simple – small chocolate cakes were made, flat iced and airbrushed, and then topped with the printed toppers – the result was quite effective.