30th Birthday spiral cake (and a sugar disaster)

The finished cake with its sugar fiasco ;)

Although my brain tells me otherwise, according to my birth certificate it was now time for my 30th birthday. Help!


In my typical fashion, I started designing my own birthday cake a long time in advance, and from the beginning I wanted to try to create a spiral cake (because I might not get a chance to try this any other time). Although I had many sleepless nights because of this intricate  design, the end result (the shape at least) was a success. In addition, my dad made me a battery powered mechanism to make my hand-made poured-sugar decoration to spin on top of the cake (perhaps I've watched too many cake decorating programs on tv?) :)

My dad's mechanism and my
hand-made sugar decoration

That was all the success there was to this cake, in my opinion. I didn't want to cover the cake in rolled sugar fondant, because as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't taste very good. Secondly, for the sheer size and shape of the cake it would have been difficult. For this reason I ended up icing the cake with a combination of white chocolate, cream cheese and whipped cream, but I soon discovered that it was very difficult to get it looking neat and impressive (on top of everything the cream went a bit runny and dripped easily). I tried to save the day by adding texture with Wilton's decorating triangle, but despite this, the cake looked dull. In a haste I chucked some sugar into a pan thinking that I'd create a dashing spun sugar decoration on top of the cake before rushing to my party (not in any point of this great idea did the fact, that I haven't actually tried this before myself, stop me!) I did learn the right technique while tossing melted sugar around my kitchen, but even that didn't save the already ruined cake. On top of everything most of the sugar (of course) dissolved into the cream...

Shaping of the cake proved out to be the
easiest to do freehand just by twisting and
carving the cake

Despite the looks the cake at least tasted good, and the raspberry filling I used found itself to my top 3 favourite cake fillings. The cake itself was a three-tier cake, so there was plenty left over after the party.