Q: I want to make a aeroplane cake for my son’s birthday. I am planning to bake a square cake and then cut it up to shape. However, planes have some tricky rounded edges which I am not sure how best to tackle. Please could you give me some tips?

A:  Plane cakes are always popular with children, I have made at least two for my own son. The easiest way to carve cake is to cut out the outline shape first and then freeze the cake. This allows you not only to bake the cake in advance but also to carve more intricate shapes, such as a curved planes wing, without the cake crumbling and falling apart. Another tip is to use a nice dense cake such as a madeira or rich chocolate, rather than a fluffy sponge. As regards covering, it is a lot easier to do this in sections and hide the joins rather than try to cover your carved cake with one sheet of sugarpaste. Another option for your son’s cake would be to create a sugar model of a plane and then pop it onto some cloud shaped cakes. I have an example in my newly re-published book ’Quick & Clever Party cakes’.

Visit my website to see what I mean.

Good Luck and Happy Baking

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