My first decorative birthday cake

We celebrated my nan's 85th birthday the other day. For this grand occasion my sister and I thought we would make her a special cake. Our nan is always knitting for either us or the charity shops, she does it so she doesn't spend all her days knodding off, awww bless her :O)  So the theme for the cake was decided. Now all we had to do was make it.

Started with a basic victoria sponge recipe by James Martin in two 8inch tins.  Filled the two halves with Apricot conserve and buttercream, then put some extra conserve on the outside of cake so the icing would stick to it better.

Next we rolled out a square of pink royal icing and then went over it with a texture roller to give a material knitted kind of look.

This was then layed over the top of the iced cake and we just teased it around a bit so it looked more lifelike.  Stuck it to the icing with little dabs of the apricot conserve.

Edible glitter, every girl should have some in their store cupboard!  It is just delightfull and comes in so many yummy colours.  I get mine off of Ebay here if you are wanting to buy some.  Brushed over the icing numbers with egg white and then just sprinkled the glitter over them.  Tip:  be sure to put some baking paper underneath so you can decant the unused glitter back into the pot.  You don't want to waste any!

 Making the ball of yarn was a bit tricky as we didn't have one of those heavy duty plunger type pipers so it was quite a job pushing the royal icing through the normal bag type I can tell you.  Note to self:  must purchase one of these!   The knitting needles were just cut down skewers and I cast on a few stitches with real wool.

The end result!  Extra touches of glitter were sprinkled round the base and we wound one of my tape measures around the side of the cake which looked quite effective.

We had soo much fun making this and after all our hardwork we were very hungry.  So we whipped up some more cake mixture dolloped it into cupcakes and 30mins later we were eating these yummy little things.

And yes you guessed it we covered them in glitter to! :o)

Thanks for popping by.