CCC No 6 - English Country Garden Cake

The theme for this session of the South Lancashire Clandestine Cake club was "English Country Garden" a suitable theme despite the unseasonal weather. Our venue was Suzanna's at Little Scotland, Blackrod a country house restaurant. We were lucky to have a gorgeous selection of cakes on the evening ranging from a Lemon and poppy seed cake to apple and elderflower.

I used my Spicy Courgette Cake recipe as the cake base for this cake , the recipe is available on the link to an earlier posting and then decorated as a country vegetable garden. I was mostly inspired by the great Fiona Cairns, the royal wedding cake maker. 

I covered the courgette cake with vanilla butter cream on the top and sides, I then used cut up "matchmaker" style chocolate sticks in orange to create a rustic fence round the garden. I then cut out to vegetable beds from chocolate regal ice and surrounded these with chocolate vermicelli.

I then created vegetables using a combination of ready coloured and home coloured fondant icing and then shaped to create the different vegetables, I also used a sweet I located on my local market as a berry bush and spaghetti to create canes for a climbing vegetable. All in all the decorating took about and hour and a half a lot longer than I normally take to decorate a cake, I enjoyed the decorating and was particularly happy to feature vegetables as this is something I enjoy growing as well. 

The decorated cake was very popular at cake club and with my work colleagues who enjoyed the leftovers.