Created Creatively: You can't eat the G string!

- Pretend for a moment that it's Saturday, because that's when I wrote this -

One week ago, I had zero plans for making any cakes (which pleased my husband). No one had yet booked me in for their special loved one's birthday cake, and it was a somewhat nice feeling having a free diary (though it did look a bit boring)!

Well, within a couple of days of that thought, I received the request for a train cake, and then late Thursday afternoon, my husband says to me: "Hey, it's Tristan's birthday next week, and this Saturday will be the last Redwoods practice before it... Do you think you can quickly come up with a guitar cake or something? I've already told the guys I'd bring cake."

Pfft. Do I think I can come up with a guitar cake?? Baby, I know I can. Consider it done.

And this is how I did it.

With 8" and 6" chocolate cakes (and a knife), I made the shape of a guitar. I'd made a rectangle from the part cut out of the bigger circle cake for the neck, but didn't end up using it:

I bought some 'caramel brown' colouring paste from my local cake shop, hoping that I could add a little bit (to white fondant) to make the body colour, and a lot to make the neck colour.

N.B. When you're covering a guitar cake with fondant, it doesn't matter if all the colour doesn't mix through evenly - it actually gives it a really nice look if it doesn't! :)

For the neck, pretty much because it's really tricky to cover little bits of cake with fondant (discovered when covering the head of the lady beetle cake), I used a Tim Tam. With a skewer, a small hole was made in the delightfully delicious little chocolate biscuit, and then pushed through until almost the other side (of the biscuit), and poked into the side of the cake!

I cheated a little with the next bit. With small white fondant circles, and wire, I made the strings for the guitar. I stuck them onto a strip of darker caramel brown fondant, which I also used to add some decoration onto the guitar later.

The final touches were black dots on the string plug things, and the tuning pegs (which were white circles painted silver, and stuck into the Tim Tam with wire). I'd cut the wire to match up to where the tuning pegs were, and it was about that time when I looked across at the guitar I'd been referring to the whole time, to notice that the neck should actually come all the way down to the sound hole... Oops!

My oldest son exclaimed that it looked really awesome (when I showed him in the morning), but that next time I should make the guitar bit smaller so that I could make a whole guitar... Thanks mate.

Nevertheless, my husband was impressed... And so was the band :)