I’ve had quite a few exciting orders this year, so I must try and start writing about them and getting up to speed, and then hopefully catch up on a few more of last years after that…! I am going to see how I get on doing more shorter posts, and I’m hoping it’ll mean I blog more often and get more done! 
My first order this year was for an 18th birthday, for a regular 8″ Victoria sponge with an elephant sitting on the top! I had quite a free reign with colours & the rest of the design, so decided to experiment & see if I could make a cute elephant holding a balloon with his trunk, which I wanted to appear to be floating! In order to achieve this, I made the elephant in advance over two days, adding gum to the fondant to help it set harder to support the balloon. I poked a hole through the trunk before it dried, and made a balloon on the end of a wire to dry in advance too. Once the cake was baked, leveled & filled, I covered it in white fondant and began to add the details. I used two different pink ribbons around the base & secured them at the back of the cake with a pretty diamanté pin, and placed a decorative pink base for the elephant to sit on on top of the cake, which was supported by dowels to take the weight of the elephant. Getting the elephant and the balloon in place was a two-person job! So, as you can guess, I roped James into help, getting him to help hold things in place as I placed the wire through the trunk & bent it into place. I was worried about the weight of the fondant balloon (I had tried a few other options to make a balloon involving Maltesters but nothing looked as good as the fondant balloon) so I decided to put the end of the wire into the cake for extra support. This meant James and I had move the elephant and balloon together and lower it on to the cake in the right position, so that the wire would go through a hole in the pink base and into a posy pick in the cake underneath. I finished the cake with the birthday girl’s name – Katie – and three ’18’s around the top. I was really pleased with the cake, and thought the elephant looked very cute, and the little details on his feet and his rosy cheeks made him look very sweet!
The elephant’s close up!
Katie’s birthday cake
The only part I failed on was getting a tall box to transport the cake in! So, in order to get around this problem, James cut a window in the top of the box for the tall parts to stick out of!!
The elephant and balloon poking out of the box!
Katie loved her cake and here you can see the picture I was sent – which made me smile as I saw her pink top matched the colour I had chosen for the cake! 😉
Katie with her cake