Beer Mug Birthday Cake

First of all please let me apologize for the huge gap between posts, for awhile I have been thinking about writing a post letting you all know I was going to have a month off from blogging. Well I though about it, I procrastinated, I spent a bunch of time looking at living rooms on pinterest, and procrastinated some more. With all my time wasting almost a month has passed anyway, so now I am back and all my time pinning lead to me buying a gorgeous new sofa so it wasn't a total loss.

So this first cake isn't a beer mug cake, clearly. It is the skydive cake I made for my Dad's last Birthday, to go with the skydive we got him as his present. There's still some debate whether it is a nice or nasty gift. Turns out I may have got my habit of putting things off from my Dad, one year on he finally booked his dive. On his birthday he jumped out of a plane!!

That's my Dad way up there. In all the excitement I missed out on some shots of the landing but you get the idea.

Pretty sure after the thrill of jumping out of a plane from 14000 feet a person deserves/ needs a nice big beer or in my Dad's case a giant mug of beer cake. 

My ideas for a beer tasting themed party were replaced by the skydive, but the beer cake was still a huge hit.

I took cake pictures super early in the morning because we had to leave to get to the skydive office. The early photos didn't work out so well, but I did get these few after Dad cut the cake. The inside of the beer mug was 4 layers of chocolate mud cake filled and covered with dark chocolate ganache. To get a little more height for the foamy head of the beer I added a thick layer of vanilla buttercream and covered the whole cake with fondant.

Happy Birthday Dad!

I've had a number of people asking questions about how to make this cake so rather than emailing you all personally I thought I'd add a few notes:

• The shape of the handle was out of light grey fondant, I inserted a pop-stick into each end of the handle to help support the weight when inserted in the cake. The handle was made a few days before so it would dry hard.
• For the board, roll out brown fondant to cover the entire board. I used a ruler the back of a knife to score in the wood and grain and let the fondant dry out before painting it with a mix of brown food colour and vodka. The Vodka thins the colouring and evaporates faster than water to stop the fondant from getting too sticky.
• I cake itself was made from two 6 inch chocolate mud cakes, with each cake split in two to give me four layers. 
• The cake was covered and filled with dark chocolate ganache. 
• Because the cake was quite tall, I didn't cover the whole cake with fondant as I usually would. Instead I wrapped the beer coloured fondant around the outside of the cake and then smoothed the join. The white fondant beer head shape was cut separately then draped over the top. 
• To attach the handle to the cake I put 2 small cuts into the cake fondant where the pop sticks would go in so it wouldn't indent too much. I brushed a tiny bit of water on the parts of the handle that would sit against the cake and then pressed it in while the cake fondant was still soft.
• The lines of colour on the sides were painted on with food colouring thinned down with a tiny bit of vodka, a mix of brown and yellow. 

I hope this helps a little. Leave a comment if there are any other questions I can answer.