Northern Lights and Polar Bears Christmas Cake – 2019

When you’re re-reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
and watching it on BBC, it cannot fail to inspire you…
and so my Christmas Cake this year became a tribute to
Northern Lights, the panserbjørn, and Iorek Byrnison.

No armoured bears on my cake, purely because my fondant work isn’t up to scratch enough to do their armour justice, but I softened the polar bears and gave them a snowball fight instead.

© Lisa Shambrook

I had fun with this one. Sketching out plans and then beginning always makes me think I’ve bitten off too much, but thankfully, so far, most of my cakes have worked, and I was really pleased with this one!

© Lisa Shambrook

Blue fondant pool, covered by a layer of white fondant icing, melted Foxes Glacier Mints (170C for 10 – 15 mins on greaseproof paper) to make ice (I haven’t been able to stop it bubbling, but I quite like it anyway), then sculpted polar bears in white fondant, with snow balls, royal icing snow drifts, sugar silver and pearl balls, and sugar snowflakes.

© Lisa Shambrook

It was also a bit of a reminder to me as ten years ago when I decorated my first cake with more than rough royal icing and plastic holly, it was with polar bears. So I’ve come full circle in a decade.

Ten years of Christmas Cakes – 2009 – 2019 © Lisa Shambrook

It’s been a bit of a bleak year, politically, and so I’m throwing myself into the few days before Christmas and enjoying my family and the Christmas spirit.

Have fun and enjoy the holidays – remember the important things:
love, compassion, and good will towards all.  

 

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie – Christmas Cake 2016

It’s an exhausting business protecting your castle ruins…
but it’s good to keep a hoard of snowballs at the ready while you take a nap…

It wasn’t difficult to choose a theme for my Christmas cake this year – I’d spent November writing a first draft of my next novel a dragon post-apocalypse fantasy, and over the past few months I’ve been making dragons and castle turrets in pottery, plus a secret piece of art involving dragons, and putting together my book of dragon short stories… It’s funny, really, that I chose dragons, lol.

© Lisa Shambrook

I made a vegan cake, as Bekah’s been vegan for about a year now. It meant using vegetable fat and switching eggs for an egg substitute. Last time I used the egg supplement, I made a chocolate cake which tasted amazing, but crumbled straight away. This time, it worked better, the fruit cake held together, but I didn’t risk moving it around too much before covering with marzipan and fondant. It may still be a bit crumbly when we cut into it!

© Lisa Shambrook

I had to slightly alter my design when I realised I’d thrown out my deep 7” cake tin, and only had a shallow 9” tin. I had wanted to create a turret all the way round the sides of the cake with a door in the side, but I think I prefer the ruins my dragon’s ended up with.

© Lisa Shambrook

My dragon is based on the sleeping dragon I made in pottery class, and I added the ruined wall, a broken wooden door, a log and snowballs. After all, defending with flames will just melt the snow and my ice dragon enjoys the fun of winter, so it’s snowball ammunition!

© Lisa Shambrook

I’m hoping for snow this Christmas, not really had any for a few years, and I’m looking forward to my feet crunching through the white stuff, building snowmen, and breathing dragon smoke in the frost…

What’s decorating your Christmas cake this year?

I hope you all have a great Christmas!