Custom cakes, or bespoke cakes, however you want to refer to them, ROCK our world. Especially when it's for cool girls like Fiammetta.

Not all custom cake enquiries are the same. More often than not, they fall flat on their face due to unrealistic budget expectations. That's fine because we have one of the largest catalogues of ready-designed birthday cakes available to order that span a variety of budgets that we can offer (or we recommend finding a home baker on Facebook...which gets mixed reactions...)

Some briefs are also just very ugly to take on. And I know ugly is highly subjective. But if I, the artist, cannot find the aesthetic appeal in a certain cake, I, the baker, may not be able to produce it to the same standard, hence we turn it down.

So when the sun, moon and stars are perfectly aligned and we have a customer who has the coolest brief with a flexible budget it's like finding the holy grail. Fiammetta's mum got in touch with us for a surfing inspired birthday cake for her daughter's 7th birthday.

She sent us a photo of a cake for inspiration and we discussed budgets and sizes and even got down to the nitty gritty details of what to include on the cake other than just surfing.

Now...point number 1...

HOW COOL IS THIS 7 YEAR OLD SURFING?!

And point number 2...

JEFFREY! The sandwich and ice cream stealing swindling seagull!!! 

I love it when cake briefs tell stories. Sure, we make "Favourite Things" cakes where we create bespoke edible figurines of the birthday guy/gal along with mini models of their favourite things and hobbies. But what I love about Fiammetta's brief is the story-telling and the memories baked in, pun intended.

As the cake needed to feed more portions than in the example image, we decided on a 2-tier 6"/8" size. And because now it was a larger size I felt it needed more elements, more texture, more pops of colour for visual interest. So we included sugarpaste coral and seashells, little fish, and to give it an illusion of movement we added some lustred rice paper waves to blend in with the buttercream and fondant waves.

No matter how many years of experience we have, making a custom cake from scratch is always a hair-raising, sleep-ruining adventure. And I love it for that. Not always, mind you...it heavily depends on the type of customer. In Fiammetta's cake, the crappy sleep wasn't down to anxiety, it was because of excitement. I literally could not wait to make her cake.

The bottom tier was chocolate Hero Sponge, and the top tier was vanilla. I used Swiss meringue buttercream in tones of blue and ivory to fill and cover the cake and then used a small palette knife to add rough flourishes along the top edge of each tier to mimic waves breaking and water "froth".

I then placed the hand-modelled figurine of Fiammetta on a surfboard in her St Ives Surf School rash vest and wetsuit. The waves around her are fondant, rice paper and Swiss meringue buttercream, giving it that illusion of movement that I was aiming for.

Jeffrey the thieving seagull was placed on the step with a little sandwich and ice cream cone with a sign. And the base of the cake was decorated with colourful coral, tiny cute fish and seashells to carry the story through from top to bottom.

This is probably one of my most favourite cakes to date. For all the right reasons - the subject was brilliant, the story was awesome, and the customer is lovely.

If you have a cool bespoke cake enquiry do get in touch! Hopefully it works out with budget but even if you don't have the budget for a blow-out bespoke cake, we can always help with alternatives within any budget. 

Surf n love,

Reshmi xoxo