My precious

This simply has to be one of my most favourite cakes I've made. I wanted to create a Lord of the Rings book but I wanted it to look worn, well read, and have a bit of antiquity to the look of it. The problem is with making a cake like that, is getting the balance between that and a cake that looks messy.

The cake itself was a red velvet with cream cheese buttercream icing. Because of this I had to leave the making of the cake until quite late as cream cheese doesn't last long without being refrigerated!

Four days before the cake was due, I began making my cover for the book. I decided not to go with fondant, many reasons but the main one is, I wanted the cover to look thick and leathery and I felt like being a bit different. So I decided to use chocolate modelling clay instead. Not only does it taste GREAT (like toffee!) But it's really easy to make,  all it is is melted chocolate with golden syrup. It is great for moulding figurines as well and as I'm not a huge fondant fan, I'd far prefer this. So I made my clay, rolled out out into the size of a book cover and began detailing. I used scrunched up tinfoil pressed onto the clay to create a leathery look. I then got started with the lettering. I used a very thin paintbrush and a mixture of edible gold dust mixed with pure vodka for the paint. This was a painstaking process but I copied the original name from a book cover and then got a copy of the elvish writing and copied it on (no tracing,  this took hours!)

Once the cake was cooled and iced I mixed some cocoa powder into a strip of fondant to look like the worn pages of the book. That was placed along the edges of the cake. Next I placed the choc clay cover over and did some final detailing on the spine and edges. And voila!

The cake was HUGE but I was very proud of it, appealed completely to my nerdy side and despite the long hours of painstakingly painting elvish letters, it looked great. Another cake completed!