831.208244 miles

I cycled to the New Forest with my brother at the weekend and did about 200 kilometres in 3 days. About 130 of them were on the first day because we forgot to book a campsite and the only one with free space was a bit further than we'd hoped.

Now, if you remember this post then you'll also remember this picture...



... which meant I got a nice little surprise when we stopped at the top of one particularly long and gruesome hill and I looked at the "Total. Distance. Ever" setting on my cycle computer:



Expect another photo in another 12,040 kilometres :-)

Twin Towers

One of the companies I work for got bought up by a larger company a while ago and the legal merger officially completed a week or so ago. I got asked to make a cake to mark the occasion - nothing fancy, just something for the department to scoff while the dust settled.

The two companies both have quite distinctive head office buildings in Frankfurt so I thought I'd try to reconstruct them in sponge cake. It's not my finest work, but I think it's my tallest:

The Silver Tower

The Silver Tower, owned by Dresdner Bank AG - a German high street bank. If the cake looks like it's about to fall over that's probably because it is...

This is what it should look like, courtesy of the Google 3D warehouse model of it.

The Commerzbank Tower

The Commerzbank Tower, owned by, er, Commerzbank - another a German high street bank. This one looks a bit more stable, but even so I'd steer clear in case of falling cakework...

Here's the 3D model for this one as well.

Severed Hand Cake

Ok, now this one might need some explaining...

My brother's having a bear-themed fancy dress party this weekend, and I said I'd make cake for him if he came up with a concept. One of his friends suggested a severed hand - the result, I suppose, of an unlucky encounter with a bear.

So here it is:

I wanted it to look like a hand when you cut through it so I dyed the cake mix pink with food colouring before cooking it, then carved out some channels for bones made from icing once it came out of the oven.

The hand with the icing for bones in position. Probably not anatomically correct, but I did remember to put *two* bones in the arm - the ulna and radius. And yes, I did just have to Google their names :-).

Making the rest of it was fairly pedestrian - just covering the cake with marzipan and ready-to-roll icing. The end result, however, was pretty gruesome. (The blood is some raspberry jam my brother made last month from the leftovers from the summer pudding).