Sewing 80th birthday cake

Look at what I delivered to the reception centre this morning, isn't it quirky? The birthday lady used to be a seamstress, specialising in wedding dresses and her daughter and son had this cake made (to feed 70 people) as a surprise. The main elements that had to be present on the cake was the mannequin with wedding dress, scissors, tape measure, pin cusshion, spool of thread and buttons + thimble. Everything on this cake is edible, even the pins you see. The main cake was a orange citrus double tier cake filled with orange and white chocolate ganache, yummmm!

I was stressed the most by having to cover the cakes in fondant but surprisingly I had no hiccups covering the 10' and 8' inch cakes. No creases and no lumps, mainly due to a neat trick "Planet Cake's book by Paris Cutter" has taught me, to ganache the outside of your cakes, let it set and then run a hot knife along the outside to smooth out bumps and creases. The cakes ended up very smooth (yay). Everything on the cake was made from scratch, only the sewing machine and scissors were made using a candy mould.

I loved the sewing machine the best, I used a candy mould to get the shape of the machine (grease the mould with some vegetable fat, pop in some fondant (Pettinice) then wack it out onto your table and let it set before moving or touching it) and used edible pastes to "paint" on the details.

The pin cusshion was made using a medium circle cutter, I cut out the green paste first, pressed the top into my mesh icing sugar shaker (to get the pattern) then used the circle cutter to cut out some grey paste, stuck them toghter and painted the base using edible silver paste. Pins were made from No 3 spaghettini (Angel hair) painted silver (edible) and topped with a coloured fondant "pinhead". All up a very time consuming project, but fun to do. I spent 3 weeks on making all the fondant items (so they could dry properly) and the last week I spent baking, assembling and covering the cakes.