Making cake for oneself or loved ones is an ethereal, slow, rainy Sunday kind of thing to do. Making cake for other people – that’s a whole other kind of cake – a high amount of pressure combined with shortened time frames and the all-important and often overlooked Delivery. I’ve made a few cakes -crazy all-nighters, wedding cakes, and those that didn’t make it to the blog that simply didn’t work. I’m not sure the stakes were ever (in my head) as high as this Canon EOS 1DX cake I made last December. This was another commissioned cake from the CEO of my company, destined for a family member, who is a world-renowned photographer for an International news agency.
Well, I’d be the first to say that no matter who you are, we all put our pants on one leg at a time. And no matter what else, a Cake Of Some Importance needs to start with – cake. Good ingredients, mixed with care. At the end of the day, this is the same recipe I’d make for my family, and I saw Pete’s cake for his brother no differently.
I did a little research, found out that the Canon EOS 1DX camera was the latest bit of technology Mike used and wrote about, for the London Olympics. There were lots of images of it – no shortage of informative Canon sites out there!
I also spent a little time sweating over whether my so-called research online regarding this dude was accurate, because lord knows I would not want to offend a life-long Nikon lover with a Canon camera cake, or vice-versa. I have a few near and dear to me who have sworn allegiance to one or the other, and I know that is dangerous territory.
The Camera bag was constructed out of cake, covered with marshmallow fondant, and yes, at least one entire bottle of black food colouring went into making all that black fondant, and the woman who helps me try to keep my house in order was horrified with my countertops afterwards as it looked like I had slain an inky octopus or something equally unexplainable.
The camera itself I molded entirely out of marshmallow fondant – and it weighed a ton, so it was great to have the camera bag to put it on, as I felt the whole cake worked better once it was assembled.
If you made it this far in this post, and you’re a Canon-ophile, you’ll already have picked out the one glaring “artistic license” I had was compelled to take. The lens is, not, accurate. But I hope I will be forgiven by those Canonophiles who will appreciate the effort – let’s leave it at that. If Canon asks for a re-do, I’m sure I’ll be able to provide a more accurate rendition.
The photo that I painted, of the silhouetted skateboarder, is a copy of the original picture taken by Mike Blake, and to see it and his blog, click here: http://blogs.reuters.com/mike-blake/
And while I didn’t get to meet Mike, my boss was happy, which is all that matters at the end of the day. I guess the irony is that most of these pictures were taken with my crappy Android phone. 
