#facecake

An incredibly exciting commission for me - my work is featured on the official trailer for this years Bake Off. I got to have a second crack at Noel Fielding and Paul Hollywood in the process and I’m proud of the results.

Plus - PLUS - a new challenge for me, I needed to make detachable mouths for these cakes in open and shut states so that they looked like they were singing! I was even required to cake wrangle on set at the filming somewhere in deepest Acton. The whole team behind this advert did an incredible job and It’s Nice That wrote a good piece of praise for them. They were also a lovely bunch of people to hang out with for an afternoon - which I was grateful for as film sets are often stressful and chaotic places.

The Daily Mail (blee) has also said I made spitting images of the four hosts, and I’m just so pleased to have been asked!

Last week when the new line up for the Great British Bake Off was announced, I was as surprised as anyone else. I like Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig very much, but it’s an odd pairing - it’ll be nice to see how they riff off each other when the series airs later in the year. I’ve got lovely visions of them getting together for regular afternoon tea meetings in order to limber up for their onscreen partnership.

I’ve been wanting to tackle a rainbow layer cake for a little while now and Noel was basically the perfect candidate - if I could have additionally made him into a pinata cake filled with unicorn candy I would have done. He is Mr Sunshine.

Instead I decided to amp up the rainbow and make him a neon layer cake. I found some brilliant neon food colouring that actually glows under UV light and used it to great effect here.

Noel is basically a double orange sponge cake with orange zest cream cheese frosting - and food colouring obviously. He tastes darned good!

My only other observation is that he has one of the most difficult faces to capture that I’ve attempted to date. Don’t know if it was the image I chose or whether he’s just a tricky customer generally - I had to re-do most of him and it’s still not completely doing it for me, and I don’t know why. Oh, and I made a gif too! Look:

What a pleasure to make a very twinkly Sir Patrick Stewart for my in-laws just before Christmas. The cake was also to die for - Nigella’s chocolate chestnut cake recipe doesn’t look like much but is super rich, velvety and like a pudding... probably exactly how you’d want SPS to taste!