highland wedding!

Of course it was not just coos that attended my cousin's wedding!!! No they had a 'proper' cake too!! It was a dinky cake, but i made it a tall one so in fact it didn't look so dinky at all in the end! We enjoyed a lovely wedding at the Old Pines Hotel, at Spean Bridge, which was just perfect with yummy food and just the ideal setting for a cosy wedding. The Highland coo cake got munched on the day, while the 'proper' wedding cake was eaten later as the newly marrieds celebrated all over again at the weekend!

Congratulations to the happy couple! It was a great day! The cake top i made for them gets all the fun tho, i tell you.... it gets to travel home to Norway with them for another party, and then again to Paraguay for even more wedding cake and celebrating!! Send us a postcard!!

here come the coos!!

Mooooo!!!! Yes up here in the Highlands of Scotland coos (cows) are horny and hairy.....aye much like the locals.... They tend to go by names such as Hamish, Hector and, er, Fred. It's true. They are also generally total suckers for romance, (Fred especially) and love to wildly wave flags on wedding days while perched on a grassy highland hilltop. It is truely a sight to behold....

What? You don't believe me? Look!! its true!!

plenty of pets!

One of the most popular requests i have for a cake top, is to include those special, often furry, members of the family that are for some reason not going to the actual wedding!! Dogs and cats.... bunny rabbits.... ferrets... budgies, and cockatoos.... lizards.......yes i did say furry, but quite often scaled or feathered or clawed too!! All wonderful tho and all great to add to a cake top so they can be involved in the big day!

I am occasionally asked for horses as well but of course as they are so much bigger than many pets, they would take up a fair bit of space on a cake which isn't always practical. Cakes these days are all shapes and sizes of course, but typically a traditional top tier would be 6 inches diameter. Also a model horse is a bit of a project in itself, as they are alot more tricky to build than a bride and groom, so my time and therefore cost has to be considered.

However just lately i had a request from Little Venice Cake Company in London, for whom i make clay figures from time to time for, you guessed it....a horse. Coincidentally around that time i had a request from a cake top customer who was very keen that her horse and pets cats would star on her cake......horses it seems are alot like buses....

LVCC's horse, above on the left, was first with a rider also sculpted in clay. This was for a cake that had been comissioned to celebrate a special birthday. The figure and horse and the grassy base they stand on are all seperate pieces, so the horse and rider would be placed on the cake as desired and then the grassy base can be used afterwards to display them. I did something similar for the bases for the cake top above right. My customer wanted to experiment a bit with how she would place the figures on her cake as she had a few options, wheter it be all on one tier, seperate tiers or even if the pets would sit on the table next to the cake. So while bride and groom are fixed to thier grassy base, the cats and the horse are not fixedto theirs, allowing them to be fixed to the cake independantly. Or if the bases are used they are actually shaped to curve around each other so they can be placed as close as possible and make a nice neat group!

Whew! So i guess it is true that for cake tops just like in the home, space and time can be an issue to what pet you may choose!!