MSRaynsford

There was a second Panto cake I worked on with  Dawn  this year, she wanted a clock mechanism with hour and second hand. The hands were to rotate quickly to show that the hour had gone past midnight and a rotating cake, on one of my rotating platforms, would show a pumpkin turning into a carriage and back again. It would have been nice if the hands were in sync with the platform but time got the better of me and I settled for hands that worked. There was quite a bit of fettling to get one tube running smoothly inside the other, the gear mechanism was actually the easy part ( svg here )

It's Panto season and like previous panto seasons it wouldn't feel right without at least one crazy rushed cake contraption. This year the Theatre Royal  are putting on Cinderella so Dawn  decided to make a fancy carriage cake for them. Once I have designed a frame strong enough to hold a massive chunk of cake it only felt right to fit bearings into the wheels and have the cake able to roll along the table. It looks like the cake might have been trying to roll away in this shot. Cake and Public

I've been cutting a whole batch of stencils recently, keeping my stocks of mylar up for the whole time. Dawn uses these maple leaf stencils to airbrush this wonderful autumnal design onto cakes. They're available to buy from her  shop

I have to admit I'm still a bit bewildered by some of these crazy cake contraptions. In this instance, these cake popping stands are used to make gifts 'pop' out of the middle of cakes. For an upcoming exhibition I was asked to motorise two of them so they can be seen going up and down automagically all day long. After a few tweaks and a redesign I ended up using non captive stepper motors pushing TR8 rods up and down. The whole thing uses a simple stepper motor driver and who know the Wemos D1 would be my preferred micro simply because of it's convenient mounting holes. The only other component is a 7805 regulator to supply the 5V to the Wemos board.

So while my kickstarter was ticking over I had a fair amount of time to complete some other large projects. This one involved me making 35 sets of rotating cake rings, where a set includes one big ring and one small ring. These rings are going into Harry Potter cakes as per the video in the link. The trouble with ordering parts from China like this is that half of them were different. Many of the larger rings came with 3 mounting holes instead of 4 and none of the holes were drilled all the way through so I was unable to bolt them in place. I ended up drilling through the rings myself which was dull and time consuming. https://www.facebook.com/DinkydoodleDesigns/videos/1373384352766827/

Here is a picture of the cake toppers actually in the cake too. It's another cake made by Dinkydoodle designs  and the toppers are cut from 3mm mirrored acrylic.

Another cake related request, I made a set of three plastic cake stands of various heights and diameters. I didn't photo the other because they were still in the protective plastic. As you can see, these all had a scout theme using their fleur de lis logo. The tabs for the verticals were cut in the wrong place so the whole thing has to be wedged together slightly but this has the advantage that, once together, the stands are very sturdy.

I made this trumpet and cornet cake toppers by request this week. They're scaled appropriately to each other and cut from Gold and Silver mirror acrylic. Only the trumpet will stand upright in the cake which is why it has the additional spikes (both still have their protective cover on for posting). Sorry it's been a bit quiet around here recently, I've had a busy month with Christmas orders and Craft fairs. I keep meaning to write some more technical articles but it's tricky finding the time, hopefully the new year will bring some new enthusiasm, I have plans.

I found some images of some very overdue projects, these projects came in while I was in the middle of my kickstarter fulfilment  and absolutely sucked up every last moment of my time. I even ended up taking a pile of parts on holiday with me just to get them completed in time, definitely a mistake I won't be repeating. It's a collection of 20 owl heads , and 55 remote control cars , 200 hours of work with a 4 week deadline, with one week on holiday and kids home for the holidays. :(

I had a spare day and an opportunity to go on a royal icing course so I thought it would be fun to try, plus another thing to learn about that compliments the rest of my cake stuff. I learnt loads of interesting things about types of icing sugar and technique for piping icing, the brush effect on the flower is particularly effective.

The fathers day lorry is very similar to most of the cars we've already done but to really make it feel like a proper truck is needed some mud guards over the wheels. It would be hard to laser cut something directly to go over them but thanks to the vacuum former I can laser cut some moulds and make some plastic arches to go over them instead. Now the arches can be covered with sugar paste to match the rest of the cake.

Way back in February, Dawn  had the idea of making a cake based lorry in the same style as the Cake cars we're been doing. It was a great idea but I knew to shift all of the additional weight of a trailer we were going to need four driving wheels and motors. The majority of the weight would be spread over the rear of the trailer so those wheels and axles were put in place with bearings to reduce the rolling resistance. The pivot point was again made with a bearing to ease turning friction. Other minor changes included a reversing beeper and a second set of brake lights on the trailer itself (with curly cable between cab and trailer). The whole thing worked well for this quick demonstration. The problems came when I loaded the trailer down with any weight. I ran my tests using 10kg of weight which the cab was able to pull but the steering was totally ineffective. All the weight was pushed into the drive wheels making the steering light, the sheer power of the four moto...

A while back I found myself on one of Dinkydoodle Designs cake course where I made a moving BB9 cake , it taught me a lot about the cake making process and I used a lot of that knowledge in making this new Toothless Dragon cake. The electronic parts are simply a servo, arduino, neopixels and a sound recorder, all fairly common parts but I learned a lot making/baking my own cake. A 9 inch round cake was baked , cut and modified to form the basic shape required. Two crescent shapes were cut and moved up to form horns, the two eye sockets were added to the cheeks to pad them out a bit.  The cake was covered in chocolate ganache  to smooth out the lumps and bumps and firm the design up. Larger dollops of ganache further filled the gaps between the horns and the head. Chocolate Silk sugarpaste was used to cover the whole cake. A large rolled sheet was stretched into place, smoothed and trimmed down to the board. Details were added using rolled...

I've also been working on a bunch of these rotating rings, they can be used in all sorts of cakes. Most turntables are solid but because these have a hole in the middle you can build cake right through them. I've made 4, 5 and 8 inch versions but failed to take any 8" photos. Useful for cakes like this