End of an era

I started making celebration cakes in 1996, and I have now decided to stop as people are not prepared to pay a reasonable price for a quality product. They think that because you work from home the cakes should be 'dirt cheap', when I tell them the price and their comment is thats expensive I tell them to go to Carrefour and buy one of their cheap mass produced cakes full of synthetic cream, as I say 'you get what you pay for'

My first big commission was Sarah's wedding cake and interestingly my last one was the cake for the wedding of Dennis and Glenys. In the intervening years I have made hundreds of cakes, in all shapes and sizes. My hairdressers children would always set me a challenge when it came to making the cakes for their birthdays, they've had dragons, Noahs ark, Igloos and penguins, and a fairy princess.

My biggest challenge was about 6 years ago when I got a phone call from a person who had had a wedding cake made in the UK and it was a fairy castle in cream and lilac. The wedding in the UK had been postponed and she had the cake shipped out here, it was 4 tiers and stood about 3 foot tall. I had to strip all the icing and marzipan off it and redocorate it as a fairy castle. There was a huge problem with this in that the bottom tier which was 16" across was in fact a polystyrene cake dummy, which had been iced. This poor bride had paid a fortune for a 4 tier cake and only had 3 edible tiers. She phoned the cake company in the UK and they basically said 'tough'. I then had to buy a 16" cake tin and set too and make the bottom tier, which was fruit. The tin just fitted in my oven and with the mixture in it I could just about lift it, it took 8 hours to bake. On the day of the wedding the cake was delivered to the venue and set up. I'd even made a knight in shining armour and a damsel in distress, representing bride and groom. The cake looked stunning, but can you imagine 4 tiers, a 16", a 12" an 8" and a 6" plus all the turrets and ramps when sliced there would have been about 400 pieces, and they only had about 50 to the wedding. I guess they liked fruit cake.

So this picture is just a small selection of some of my cake decorating equipment which I am bringing to the UK and giving to my friend Ann, who still makes cakes. When we drive over next year for Sarah's wedding the rest of the equipment will come with me and go to Ann.