From little things big things grow........

I had an interesting request from a friend, Tammie, the other day. She wanted me to come over to her house pronto and help her decorate a Grade Six Graduation cake with a Llama!!

Bizarre. Didn't think I would ever be asked for a Llama on a cake, but there you go. I really like Tammie and I thought it was a good chance to catch up.

It was for the school my son will go to next year and she is a teacher there with a reputation for baking too.

We didn't have a lot of detail, just that we needed to collect the premade cake from the school at lunchtime and return it two hours later! We didn't know the size of the cake, the shape of the cake or anything. I grabbed some tools from home and headed to Tammie's house.

Also, knowing my love for the internet, you know I jumped straight on and found the above image of a Llama. I then covered all bases and copied it and enlarged it several times. I kinda thought that if it was a small cake (let's hope) we could put one Llama on it and be done. If it was a big cake we could depict the llama's growing and the journey from being a little primary school kid to a big high school kid.

I then made a stencil out of all of them. Something I have never done before but will do again as you can lay the stencil down and pipe in the middle and carefully remove. Tada!

I can honestly say that when my friend, Tammie, arrived home with the cake I was shocked. I had never seen a cake this size. My picture does not do it justice. It was about 1 metre long and 40 to 50 cms wide (guessing here). It felt huge and was covered in very ordinary cream, which was not as ordered.

I thought it would be best to remove the cream and ice it. Icing is easier to work with usually. However, I was also nervous that they had covered it to hide something. I was right! The cake had a big divet in it. In hindsight, I shouldn't have removed the cream as the cake was so big and therefore the icing was really hard to get smooth without all my tools.

Tammie set to work on making about three batches of icing, while I set to decorating the cake. We thought it would be great to incorporate the colours of the school, hence the red and blue blankets and also there was red and blue piping on the sides and bottom of the cake.

I shy away from writing on cakes. Avoid it as best I can. Never actually found a "cake writing font" as they call it in the trade, so I encouraged Tammie in this endevour!! She did a great job! Go Tammie!

I think we did a pretty good job with 2 hour timeframe and two three year old kids under our feet on a 43 degree day!

The school had to ring around town to find a fridge big enough to hold it until the Graduation Night. It ended up at the catering kitchen of the local University Restaurant.

All in all, Graduation night was a success and we had lots of positive feedback on the cake.