A couple of weeks ago my lovely Dad finally left his job of many, many years. As we’re still working through the great glut of pumpkins he gave us, what better than to make a cake with his own home-grown produce! He is an avid gardener and I’m sure will be spending a lot more time on the allotment from now on.
I used the same recipe as my Halloween Spiced Pumpkin Cake from a few weeks back, covering it in chocolate buttercream to imitate the soil. The vegetable patch I actually found quite easy to make – colouring up fondant in different greens and an orange, shaping, slicing, scoring the pumpkins, and shading the courgettes with a fine paintbrush.
The finished vegetable patch – with the fondant simply ‘planted’ into the allotment by pressing gently into the still-wet chocolate buttercream.
For the personal message on the cake, feeling less than confident with free-hand writing onto the cake, I used a matching piece of chocolate fondant, pressing in letter stencils before piping over with a light green icing.
And to finish, matching ‘Dad’ personalisation on green fondant leaves set onto the cake board.
A simple but pretty quick idea that I’m really pleased with the result of, and of course a very Happy Retirement to my Dad! I’m sure there’ll be more garden-produce bakes coming this way as he spends more time nurturing the allotment…
