In the summer I made this Numberjacks cake for a 2nd birthday party. The recipient is a big fan of the CBeebies series so this was the perfect cake! Below you can see the number 2 from the programme that the cake was modelled on.
It was a little bit stressful covering this cake I did have to wrestle with it a little bit. It was extremely warm when I was covering as well which made the paste a little bit difficult to handle. After about 5 attempts at covering my 2 I had to turn to Twitter for advice and fortunately Nirusha from Insanely Cakes came to my rescue. The trouble with covering a 2 is that you need to get the paste into the corners without stretching and tearing it. The solution? To make your paste almost twice as long as your 2, place it over the top and then lift and smooth it into the corners!!! So I finally managed to get there and the final covering wasn't too bad.
You can see on the original Numberjacks picture that the 2 has a little nose and quite pronounced eye sockets/eyebrows. In order to achieve this look I put a little ball of orange for the nose and two curved sausages of paste for the eyebrows actually underneath my final paste covering. I placed these on the uncovered cake and covered over them and I was very pleased with the result. For the mouth I just unsed a mini-pallette knife to cut through the icing.
Two of my favourite things on the cake are the eyelashes and the little Numberjacks around the edge of the 2. To make the eyelashes I just cut out small strips of black florist paste and then cut into it to make it look like eyelashes. I then lay them over a paintbrush and shaped it in a curve before leaving t them overnight to dry ready to be place onto the cake.
For the little numbers around the side, I used number cutters and cut out florist paste in the correct colour for each number and then to really bring them to life I added the eyes. You could quite easily make these yourself but I happened to have some of these Candy Icing Eyes which really did the trick! The numbers around the side also had the added benefit of covering any areas where the icing had stretched a little bit!
Normally when I cover a board I will cover around a cake which is already in situ, for this one I covered the board and then transferred the cake over and put the ribbon around it. This is not the best way to do it but all my techniques seemed to go out the window on this cake. To give an extra dimension to the cake and board I used my 2 number cutter to imprint 2's into the white icing. The idea came from Petra at PetraB's Allsorts who had done the same on her Numberjacks cake.
The good thing about Numberjacks is that you can make a cake for young children of any age...just pick a number!
