Cake painting

Before the last LARP event, I decided I was going to decorate a cake for an IC coronation we were planning. The faction I am now part of is big on heraldry, so it was an easy decision to make to create a cake adorned with the heraldic device of the kingdom we were holding the coronation for. Unfortunately, the in game heraldry was not designed particularly well, so I had some pretty tough source material to work from.

The shield of Essex

I spent ages thinking about the best way to achieve this on a cake. I settled in the end for airbrush food paint, as I thought stencils and using Jamie's airbrush (that we bought for painting 40k models!).

Our first experiments with the airbrush didn't go so well. The paint transferred onto the icing alright, but I couldn't get crisp edges from my stencils, and the risk of the red and blue bleeding into each other and making a horrendous blackish-purple was too high. In the end, I settled for painting by hand.

I decided to do two cakes, as the only pre-iced cakes I could find were quite small. This Lion is one I found in a Google image search, which co-incidentally turned out to be exactly the same one as the previous Kings had used as their symbol and was all over banners all over the camp! It took a couple of coats of the food paint to get a good clean covering, but it was worth the effort.

I failed to get a picture of the finished cakes. The Essex cake had "Long Live the Queen" iced around the edge, and the Lion cake said "We Shall Not Falter".

I was so pleased with how they turned out! And everyone at the event said such nice things about them. I have already started planning my second attempt at cake decoration.

I'm going to do a much bigger one this time, with all ten shields on it. Some of them have quite intricate designs, and they will be smaller than the one I made (only 3 inches tall) as they will be adorning the side of the cake rather than the top. I've found a decent sized iced sponge cake on the Waitrose website, which I will be ordering as soon as the date for the banquet is announced! Watch this space!