A 60th birthday was approaching, we were asked to provide the cake.. With a small catch, it needed delivering to New Orleans.*

We were given fairly free reign with this cake, as long as it fed 200 people, tasted good and had a 60s/hippy theme then all was well. Given the delivery requirements we also had to make sure it was transportable, meaning most of it needed to be set up on site.

To fulfil the size requirement we started out with a base, the flower bed, half chocolate cake and half butter cake it was made up of 3 half sheet cakes. Totalling 18″ wide by 33″ long! Wanting to add a bit of pizzazz we made a stem coming up from the centre, with a sunflower head at a 45 degree angle on top of it, with the surprise aspect of the sunflower spun! The sunflower head was a lemon chiffon cake, nice and light yet flavourful. We created the look of the seeds in the centre with chocolate chips glued on with royal icing.

The flowers filling the bed were made form gumpaste. We made them abstract shapes, and in variegated colours, some were even marbled in several colours. We couldn’t transport them assembled so the stems and leaves were made and the flower heads added on site.

We topped the base cakes with a layer of chocolate buttercream and then some cookie crumbs for the dirt effect.

As a final touch some peace signs were added to the garden.

The cake had the perfect site at the venue, a table with spotlights above it. So with the dimmed lights of the party it really stood out.

We are pleased to say the cake was demolished and everyone enjoyed it, many people took samples of each flavour. As a nice touch, one that we were pleased to see, many of the children got sent home with one of the flowers as a token.

Here’s a brief video of the spinning sunflower in action.

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*I should make the point here, we don’t usually deliver cakes to 500 miles away. This was an exception.