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Happy New Year guys!! I hope you are all having a fabulous start to the new year and if you are still on holidays – lucky you!

I don’t actively take on client orders anymore but occasionally a past client will ask or a request comes by that is too exciting to pass up and this was one of them. I really enjoy a challenge and one of the things I miss most about client orders is getting to do something new each week. Unfortunately, one of the small downsides to teaching is that you tend to teach the same design again and again. And even while designing classes, you tend to be limited by the timeframe of the class and what the market currently wants to learn.

So when a client asked me to make an Arabian palace cake for her husband’s 50th, it was as much an indulgence as it was a challenge.

I always tell my students that the planning of any cake usually takes a long time and that is because I tend to draw out and measure my plans and then let it sit for a day so I can reevaluate it. Sometimes I come back the next day to move things around or have a light bulb moment overnight where I come up with a better way of doing things. So I usually don’t like to rush this part of the creative process.

I made the cake to match the size of the display table. The client wanted it to be quite the centrepiece and since the party was at an event hall, I had to make sure the cake was big enough to stand out. The board was about 1m x 1m and I am guessing the whole project weighed about 25kgs+. And since it was going to be big, not all of it would be real cake. Or else there would just be WAY too much cake!

I know at this point some of you will be questioning why I didn’t use other edible mediums like rice krispies to make the turrets or the top part of the turrets and here is the honest truth… While yes, it is nice to say that everything is edible, the reality of it is that:

1. The guests are unlikely to eat the rice krispies. I don’t think a anyone wants a serving of rice krispies with their slice of cake, nor would they want a slice of rice krispies instead of cake.
2. It is too time consuming – (This one here is more important to me) It would take far longer for me to make/shape the rice krispies than if I sourced and covered existing styrofoam shapes. The time I save here means that I can give the client a more competitive quote and/or spend the time on making the cake look more awesome. Personally to me, first impressions really matter.

Anyways, here are just some of the behind the scenes pictures of how this cake came together…

The finished cake! I am so pleased with how it turned out and that I got to start my year off with such a cool project. Also, I am slightly relieved that it barely just fit into the back of my car and travelled to the venue with no issues 🙂 Overall, the most time consuming part was really all the repetitive parts like the covering and detailing of the turrets and if I had more time I think I would have loved to have added a few cute little palm trees!