How I wish I could make beautiful cakes...

Today, my eldest son, Albert is 16! I have been planning to make a birthday cake for the last couple of weeks, and have been gathering up supplies or red sugar-paste and tubes of writing icing. The idea was to make a Liverpool FC shirt cake. You can buy shirt shaped tins (complete with muscle definition), but my thoughts were that a) it's too expensive and b) I could probably wing it with a rectangular tin and cupcake combo!

Making the cake was the easy bit: 225g butter, sugar and flour and 4 eggs. I poured this into two cupcake cases and the rectangular tin. I searched the Internet for the right sized mixture for the tin I have, but I could only find recipes for round or square cakes, so I guessed!

Whilst it was cooking, I prepared the background board by marking out a football pitch in pencil on some baking parchment, then turning it over and attaching it to a wooden chopping board.

Once the cake was cooked (30 minutes), and cooled on a rack, I sliced it in half. I have never done this before and I was surprised that the whole cake didn't collapse. I covered one half in butter cream and the other in raspberry jam. With the two cupcakes, I sliced them about a third in and adjoined them to the main cake with some butter cream. They look ridiculous at this stage.

The icing started off as a bright poppy red, but because when you roll it out, you have to sprinkle the work surface with icing sugar, the colour become less and less vivid. I re-rolled it three times to get the right shape, so this didn't help with the colour dilution! And basically, it all started to go downhill from there as you can see!

It's not too bad if you squint at it! Anyway, this whole thing reminds me of a blog which I used to read a lot and laugh a lot at - Cake Wrecks - hilarious cakes gone wrong. Let's hope mine does not feature!

Love

Mrs Jones x

P.S. I am sure it will taste better than it looks!!!