Need inspiration! Making cake for 26 people for mum's 70th...

[Wigeon]

I have somehow volunteered to make enough cake for 26 people to have for pudding at mum's 70th birthday lunch. I have some random thoughts, but they are not coming together into a coherant plan, so any advice welcome!

I reckon I probably need to make about 3 cakes? Round not square (as I have round tins).

Not sure whether to make three identical cakes, or three with different flavours, but decorated in some kind of way which brings them all together. Or whether different flavours is bad because one flavour will inevitably be more popular than the others and will run out...?

I really like this malteaser cake, but not sure what else to do with it. My mum would probably prefer a non-chocolate cake option (but lots of the guests would like chocolate I'm sure).

I did a rainbow cake for DD's 5th birthday, which looked fab, although it was very tall (because of the rainbow layers!) so the slices were very tall and thin!

I am feeling rather uninspired about flavours - my mum likes coffee and walnut, but not sure how to make that look a bit more sophisticated than I'd make just for Saturday teatime. I can do chocolate, or victoria sponge...any other ideas?

Basically, WWYD if you were making cake for 26 people for a 70th birthday?!

if I was doing this I would do a plain Victoria sponge and try to make the icing really nice, something pretty and a bit old fashioned.

I would do a tower of cupcakes in different flavours & icings so there is something for everyone. I would also do a seperate coffee cake for your mum & put candles on that. This Delia Austrian coffee cake is very rich:

www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/party-food/austrian-coffee-and-walnut-cake-with-coffee-cream.html

Maybe do a vintage tea party theme, tea, coffee, lots of mismatched china, yummy cakes, pastries and you have to bake a victoria sponge. I think with 26 guests, you can get away doing lots of small cakes & pastries and have a variety on offer.

I would do a big number cake. They really are very easy to do. You dont need special tins. There should be a picture on my profile of a chocolate malteaser number cake and I also have a vanilla one without malteasers somewhere I can post a pic of if you would like.

They can be quite pricey buying the cigarellos but for a special occasion like a 70th I would do something like this.

www.google.co.uk/search?q=chocolate+cigarellos+cake&rlz

I made one like that baking for a 50th recently and instead of cigarellos I used wafer rolls. They were About £1 a tin from home bargains or The Range iirc.

Ooooh must check those out Mike thanks

wigeon can I ask what recipe you sued for your DDs cake, it looks great! Im thinking of making one soon for a friends 40th, with a Rainbow theme. I've googled and came across the BBC one which has pretty rubbish reviews actually. I know I need to use the pastes rather than the liquid colours to.

Ive used chocolate fingers on cakes like that before, the white ones looked good. They were on special in Morrisons for £1.

used!

Thank you everyone for the ideas! I am now having dreams about cake!

Electryone - I didn't really use a recipe, I just googled several sets of instructions about how to make a rainbow cake and kind of improvised! I'm pretty sure I just used Victoria Sponge rather than the denser mixture that that BBC food site suggests. Definitely use paste colours not liquid (you can get paste colours in Hobbycraft - and you can just get red /blue /yellow and mix up purple and green from those - which I didn't think of to start with!).

The main thing to bear in mind is that it ends up being a very tall cake which is almost impossible to cut, so do make your layers very thin. I'm not sure how the cook who made the BBC picture got the layers so beautifully flat - mine were definitely thicker in the middle (because the cake rose in the middle), and thinner at the edge.

I used buttercream to stick the layers together, then covered it in fondant icing, and made a picture of a sun on top, by cutting out a sun template (googled an image of a sun then printed it out on normal paper and cut it out), and made the sun by spraying through with edible gold spray. Then the sun's smile was a strawberry bootlace and the sunglasses were from black fondant icing.

Everyone loved it!

I am now v excited to have found a polka dot cake, which looks v cool...

If you're going to need to do 3 cakes anyway, why not do one "display" cake of plain madeira with fondant icing to put the candles on then a coffee and walnut and a chocolatey one to actually eat? The coffee and chocolate ones can be ready cut in the kitchen and you just ask people what they'd like as you go along

I'm a bit worried that the first third of guests will get a genuine choice between the three cakes, then as the waiters go round asking people, the choice will diminish and the last third of people will get lumped with whatever is the least popular of the three cake flavours! Or is that over-thinking it?!

I have just ordered a silicone cake pop mould thingie from Amazon (£3.39 with free delivery) as I NEED to make that polka dot cake at some point... ...well, it's both the DDs' birthdays, plus DH's birthday, in the next few months...

Are you on Pinterest? There are lots of ideas on there!

IME most people will be unable to decide and ask for a little bit of both you could always make enough cake for 16 (4 egg sponge equivalent?) of each flavour - if you do the choc and coffee pre cut or as cup cakes you could add the icing last minute then the cake itself will freeze