Argyle Pattern Birthday Cake

I was given very little direction for this cake other than it should be a standard square cake & it should be black & orange.  I do like to have creative reign over my cakes but sometimes it can be hard to come up with a design if there is no theme, especially if it is for a male as the cake also has to look masculine.

So after a long time throwing around ideas I decided on an argyle pattern which the customer said would be perfect.  I also think with a change of colours this would be a great starting point for a golf cake.

The 12" square cake (approx 72 regular serves) was my 'Midnight Delight' (dark chocolate mud) cake with added Baileys for that little grown up touch.  In-between the layers was a rich Baileys chocolate ganache which also coated the outside of the cake before it was covered in a chocolate marshmallow fondant.

Black can be a terrible colour to make fondant as you can have to add so much black to it to get a deep enough colour that it changes the consistency of the fondant so the way to get around this is to start out with chocolate marshmallow fondant so that is is fairly dark to begin with.

To achieve the famous argyle pattern I overlaid the black fondant with 2 different shades of orange diamond shapes & then added the stitching lines.

To help make the the pattern appear seamless from the top to the sides of the cake I added some fondant 'piping' around the top & bottom edges of the cake.