Christmas cake 2009

I always try to think of a new idea for decorating our Christmas cake each year. Not so much to impress people, but just because I really enjoy the process of decorating cakes.

You can see some of our past Christmas cakes here.

This year I searched for cake toppers for inspiration and didn't really find anything that I was happy with. I knew I wanted to use roll-out icing as last year I didn't do very well with the royal icing method.

As December approached I still didn't have an idea and then we were making glittery Christmas pictures one day and it made me think about some edible glitter I had in the kitchen cupboard.

Here's what I ended up doing:

I covered the cake in marzipan and ready to roll icing as usual. I made some sugar syrup using just sugar and a little water, reducing it so that it got nice and sticky like glue.

I painted a simple snowflake design on the cake, then covered the entire thing with edible glitter (disco green, just because that's what I had in the cupboard) and waited about 10 minutes for it to really stick and dry a little.

I was going to dust off the excess glitter with a pastry brush but Cameron decided he wanted to blow it off - so he did! - and covered our entire kitchen in glitter!

The sugar "glue" worked well and I finished it off with some sugar pearl decorations from a shaker set we bought at the supermarket.

I really like it - what do you think?