Hi all,
this is a book cake I made this weekend for Father’s day. I couldn’t post it on FB yet because my dad now has it and follows my page – yesterday I noticed he learnt how to share a pic, he shared one of my cakes on his wall and liked it himself haha XD so I guess now I have to wait!

This is a carrot cake baked in a 9×13 pan. I used SMBC to cover and fill, to a new recipe I’ve been meaning to share with u all soon. There are a few things I learnt the hard way on this one:

1. never, ever try to carve a carrot cake. or even torte it. never! It’s my most requested flavour by family and friends and my other half has been asking for it for months but I’ve been putting it off because of the extra work involved. I finally caved and thought I could bake it in one pan (I only have the one at that size) then split it and shape a little. Needless to say the walnut pieces and raisins inside it dragged through on the knife and made a horrible mess. I don’t even think freezing would help unless the whole thing was frozen solid, because of those little nuts. After the nightmare of torting I decided not to bother carving the top to shape. Lesson learned!
2. SMBC and I are not friends when it comes to covering a cake. idk how people who use bc under their fondant do it, I highly suspect there’s some form of witchcraft involved! This is my third and hopefully last attempt. Ganache forever from now on! just have to not be too lazy to make a batch when I need it!
3. I need to learn to throw away part used packs of store bought fondant, or freeze them or something because no matter how I package them I seem to get little dried out pieces. This time I didn’t notice until i’d rolled it all out and put it on the cake, where it promptly dragged on the SMBC and destroyed the crumb coat (refer back to point 2), and then tore and cracked with dried chunks flying out when I tried to smooth it down. If I’d not been too lazy to make some of my own fondant this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe I need to try a different brand :/

Other than that I had fun decorating :) Wafer paper, edible lace, fondant and little green chocolate gems. The board is fondant bas relief, airbrushed in gold lustre (metallic dusts are near impossible to clean out of the barrel properly, be warned!) then dusted for extra sparkle.

Thanks for looking!
Sawsen xx