Birthday cake....

On Friday I was told that a cake was needed for Monday, a cake to feed 160 people.  It's Jimmy Pham's birthday next week but the staff and trainees wanted to celebrate his birthday with him early.  Doan, Thu and I made the cakes on Friday.  A bottom tier of chocolate mud, a middle tier of carrot and green apple and a top tier of Donna Hay's lemon flavored butter almond cake.  We made some royal icing run outs of the koto logo...(remember the little abstract figures that I made xmas hats for in the restaurant?)  It was the first time I've ever made run outs as well as Doan and Thu's...but they turned out OK.  We also did some pink and white two tone piped flowers which were set aside to dry harden over the weekend.
This morning Doan and I iced the three cakes with white royal icing.  We made cake boards out of bits of wine boxes wrapped in tinfoil and cling film...you do what you have to do.  The tins were donated by Frazer and Hughes in Sydney (thanks guys) so we were limited to making the cakes that size.  I would have liked to have made the tiers more balanced but it's OK if a little solid.
Anyway, we used the runouts, the flowers and the finished result was quite pretty in the end.

a very happy Mr Doan after we finished...

it wasn't as wonky as it looks...

the run-outs turned out really well in the end...

and the flowers too...though I'm sure the ladies cake decorating guild would be horrified...

best of all...every skerrick was polished off later in the evening.

This is the gingerbread house I produced in the class I had run during the afternoon.  I put the roof on then decided to show them how great the houses can look with a tea light candle inside...but there weren't any tea lights.  We decided to try cutting up a normal candle...so I did...I lit it...the kids all applauded because it looked great.....then they started laughing and shouting hysterically because they'd noticed smoke coming out of the roof!!!!  The bloody candle was way too high and had almost set fire to the bloody cake!  The icing melted and one of the the roof panels slid off  but we quickly blew out the candle and I managed to fix the damage pretty well - next gingerbread house will have smoke alarms installed.