A cake emergency? Becca to the rescue!

School finishes early in Scotland, on the 28th June this year.  Well, actually it isn't that early - my American friends seemed to finish earlier than that, and they have 11 or 12 weeks of holiday - eek!!  And luckily for us our Swedish friends finished a week or so before us and were able to come to our fair city to visit us.  But it is a few weeks earlier than in England (down South), and we go back the commensurate number of weeks earlier too.  I imagine it may have something to do with the weather or daylight hours or something, but either way it was that time of year for graduations and moving up a grade and so on.

And today I got a text from a regular customer, let's call her P, saying she had a cake emergency and could I help?  I replied honestly, saying it was unlikely but what did she want?  The request was for a vanilla cake with white icing and decorations in the school colours of purple and green, and it had to have the school name on top and Class of 2013.  It was to be the treat on the table at the Primary 7 leavers dance arranged for that evening.  For those of you not in the UK, Primary 7 is the highest grade in elementary/primary school, after which the children go up to a (different) high school.  It's a bittersweet night, because the kids go from being big fish in a small pond, to the smallest of fish in a very big pond (as usually a number of primary schools feed into one high school).

I calculated the time available, and discussed ideas with a cake-baking friend, and lo, I was able to rearrange my day to allow for baking and decorating of said cake to her requirements - and thus save the day!  

I felt that, because time was of the essence, I would not try to smooth the buttercream but rather chose a design that had texture, thus allowing me to achieve the effect in a more timely manner.  I also had to think which style of decoration would go with that style of icing, and decided upon stars in the school colours, as all the kids were stars in their parents eyes.

I'm really pleased that I managed this cake in the short time available, and was thrilled that P's husband loved it when he came to collect it.