A birthday cake for each and everyone.

Moral subjectivists will tell you that truth is mind-dependent, that there is no objective right or wrong: an ethical belief is only true or false as far as it is your actual opinion. What can a baker learn from this? Birthday cakes follow a similar code: they are as subjective as baking ever gets, because they are tailored to the individual. And there's no objective right or wrong, because it also says what the baker thinks of them.

So using the sponge & buttercream recipies below, any of these are possible, with some creativity and the right tools...

To my friend who's a ray of sunshine...

A sunshine cake: classic victoria sponge, filling of rasperry jam and vanilla buttercream (swap rum flavouring for vanilla essence), topped with yellow coloured icing and sugar butterflies (Morrisons; £1 something).

 

To the one who likes  to drink a lot....

A rum bottle, named 'friscino' after the notriously cheap (but lethal in vast quanities) sparkling perry by Costcutter.

I made a double quantity plain sponge in a square cake tin (one of those rubber ones, no grease needed, its absolutely genius!) and used various sizes of deep cookies cutters to form the bottle shape. The bottom should be the biggest, then the next size down for most of the rest of the bottle, until you almost come to  the neck (a medium-sized cutter) then a couple of the smallest cutter pieces forms the nect. I sandwiched them together vertically, one by one, with raspberry jam and rum buttercream (getting stronger towards the top!). It was getting a little like the leaning tower of Pisa at some points, so I stuck some of those long cocktail stick type things through my little sculpture, ran to Morrisons for royal icing and wrapped a whole packed, rolled, around it. I used some of another packed, painted with very watery blue icing, for the cap, and rolled out a rectangle for the label, painted it with similarly watery peach icing, nd once that had dried: used a slight thicker yet still runny blue icing, and wrote on it with a knife. Stick your 'label' to the 'bottle' with more icing. A cake guarenteed to impress.

To my very girly friend...

She's pretty; she likes pink, she was always bound to love a pink iced victoria sponge, filled with strawberry jam, decorated with pink sugar glitter, sugar butterflies & haribo hearts.

 

To my northern friend....

A cake of The North! Okay, so I made Derwent College almost as big as Preston, but I never said it'd be to scale...
 

This was definitely the most fun to decorate, and genuinely cathartic. I made the sponge base (square cake tin, 1 1/2 quanity recipe) the day before, then gave myself a good two hours, straight after my Ethics exam, to create my northern prodigy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thick green icing (minimal water used) made the landscape. I used a short, sharp knife to cut bits of a chocolate wafer bar (I used a caramel Drifter) to form buildings (and the odd train!).

 

The moors, dales and lake district were bulked up by bits of rolled icing below the green icing layer. I used thin blue icing for rivers and lakes, and plain icing to 'glue' together 3D bits such as York Minster and the Angel of the North. Signposts were simply bits of sticky label on cocktail sticks. It looked too pretty to eat, and making it got me through a very stressful day: I think the Cake of the North was my favourite.

 

To my american friend.... 

Nothing says 'Happy 21st' like your seeing your country's flag in cake form. Luckily she was too drunk to realise 1.) that there was only one layer, because the first had dripped and burnt onto the bottom of the oven due to not mixing the butter properly and 2.) that there were only 15 milky way stars, not 50 odd. Maybe its the american flag during the civil war?

   

...and when she left: half american flag, half union jack. I think one semester at York is enough to make someone half British.