I am not an expert on icing (more on eating ) but I am not a huge fan of icing as a taste. Personally, I like the mouth feel of chocolate ganache much better (which would be chocolate with cream bascially as here). I don't think there's any reason why it couldn't be used with a plain sponge cake, unless the recipient would prefer a chocolate cake as well? I'm mentioning this as I would have thought this might also be quite "special" and also quite manageable.

Hope your auntie has a lovely day!

Hmmm...can't remember but it was quite expensive for what it was. I think maybe 3 quid per tin.
There is a book by australian women's weekly on Childrens cakes, which a friend had lent me, that tells you how to make digit cakes yourself, for each digit. I was in the shop trying to get a big cake tin or whatever it recommended, and they told me about their tin hire. So if hire not an option you could try and find this book, I have seen it in several shops since so I think you might be likely to find it in a book or cookery shop.
Also you can buy the digit tins on ebay. Or you could when I was looking, but I didn't have time to wait for them to arrive.

How much was the tin hire?

I think I will try with fondant as that came out ok last time

I did this for my mum and went for the cheating option of the 6 and 0 cake tin hire from local cooking shop.
And I put butter icing on it, and I did end up with crumbs in it so the above tip would be good!! It was yummy though.

Thank you for answering me.

That is the same recipe as I normally use. I thought royal icing was the proper one to use, I'm sure thats the one that my aunty uses. I'll have a look around tomorrow.

After all the years of making us lovely cakes I'd like to return the favour

OK, I would hot-foot it to my nearest cake decorating shop, where they will probably have a wide range of tins for hire, including every number.

They will also be able to advise you on the quantity of mixture for the '6' and the '0'. I always just use a straightforward Victoria sponge mixture (2oz each of s/r flour, caster sugar & butter to each egg) and find it keeps fine for even 3 days if it's well wrapped.

I've practically no experience of icing in royal icing although I would wonder why you want to put royal icing on sponge cake... personally I'd go for the fondant or maybe even lots of stars of butter icing done with a piping bag.

If you're doing butter icing I would freeze the cake first and ice it from frozen as you'll get fewer crumbs lifting into your icing.

And if it's fondant, I always leave it at least 24 hours before icing for similar reasons.

HTH... admittedly I wouldn't know where to start carving a big square cake into a 60!!

My aunty is 60 on Saturday and she has always made all of our birthday cakes. I would like to attempt to make her a cake.

I can make a basic sponge cake but all I have is an 8 inch square cake tin.

I have iced a cake before with fondant icing, is it alot harder with royal icing?

Any ideas?