18th Birthday Disco cake - Cakes Bakes And Cookies

This is the cake I made for the lovely Jo’s 18th birthday last month.

When we sat down to chat about the design we talked about what she’s into. She’s really musical and likes to go out clubbing and her party had a black, white and red theme so this is the design I came up with.

Jo wanted the cake to be stacked with music notes on the top layer with dancers on the bottom tier. I decided that the best way to get uniformed notes was to get a patchwork cutter. Luckily I found this disco themed one with both dancers and music notes in the set. Result!

https://amzn.to/48kOmps

These Disco Dancers –Patchwork Cutters are available from Amazon

The ’18’ on the top was easy to position. The rest… not so much!

I used sugarpaste to cut out the decorations but really should have used flower paste as it’s firmer and easier to handle. I had to cut out the notes and dancers and leave them for 10 minutes to dry and harden up enough to be handled.

The dancers! Well, let’s just say they tried to dance right off the cake! I found that every time I tried to pick them up they moved in a different direction or broke. In the end I cut them out onto small sheets of silicon paper and dampened them a little on the back then positioned the bottom of the paper against the cake and gently stood the dancers up, pressing from the bottom up. That did the trick!

I know from experience that once you mark a white cake with a black decoration it’s really hard to clean it up. For some reason black sugarpaste is just super sticky – way more than any other pre-coloured sugarpaste.

I was really happy with how this cake turned out. I like the way the silhouette of the dancers sits over the thick ribbon. I will definitely be using that technique again.