Cake Queens: Cake Queen 8b - Geraldine from Cake My Day

Hi, I'm Geraldine Arnold from Cake My Day. My fabulous friend Niamh Geraghty from the Perfectionist Confectionist came up with the brilliant idea for this project. As we're usually plotting and planning some kind of mischief we had great fun working this one out.

There was an online collaboration between cakers worldwide recently called the Starry Night project - an edible interpretation of Van Gogh's painting. The thing with that was that each caker made their piece, took photos, and the photos were put together to show the final finished painting. In our case, we wanted to have 50 different cakers in Ireland make actual cakes and physically put them together into a frame to look like the original painting. So we spent a good while trying to find a suitable painting to use and finally found Simone Walsh's "From Croke Park to the Aviva". We loved it because it was so bright and colourful and almost cartoon-like and would lend itself very well to being made from cake!

So we got to work, found 48 other cakers who were willing to get involved, got a 40" x 30" print of the painting, divided it into 50 and sent it out. Then I got cracking on my piece...

Straight edges are ultra important so I rolled out flower paste for the base of my topper. I then traced my image and etched it into the flower paste.

I wanted my piece to have a very textured and 3-D effect, so I rolled white sugarpaste into cylinders for the smoke stacks. I attached blue sugarpaste with edible glue for the water.

But flat blue wasn't enough for me for the water - oh nooooo.... I made loads of tiny blue ribbon roses and dusted them with blue edible glitter. Ooooooh sparkles! I also discovered that I had blue sprinkles in my stash of cake stuff. See, there are advantages to being a bit of a magpie and buying all sorts of cake stuff you may never use ;)

Once my glittery sprinkley rosy water was made, I moved on to the black tarmac of the road and discovered I also have some black sanding sugar! The supports for the bridge are made from modelling chocolates, textured with a kemper tool. The grass is some lime-green sugarpaste cut into a strip and folded on its side into the right shape.