Cake making - stage three

Stage 1.
Remember where you stashed the cakes when you made them several weeks ago. In the case of one cake it was easy: it never made it off the kitchen table. The others we located in the Camping Cupboard, the flat's resident tardis and store of all things random.

Stage 2.
Clear a space in the kitchen. This involves moving boxes and boxes of wine, and reshuffling paperwork to take up less space. Wipe table (see - hygenic as ever)


Stage 3:
Unwrap the cakes...


and lay them on the board-covered-in-metallic-paper


Stage 4:
Line the cakes up so that they are roughly the same height. Try to get them central on the board, then give up. Decide not to trim them so that they fit snugly, because then someone gets the special present of marzipan-polyfilla. Yummmmmy!


Stage 5:
Cover the cake in apricot jam. Why apricot? I know it's traditional, but why? Or is this just of the great unanswerable questions of our time?


Stage 6:
Roll out your marzipan and get kneading. And rolling. And kneading. And rolling. And... until your knuckles give out.


Stage 7:
Place the marzipan on top of the jam-covered cake. How hard can it be? Repeat, ad infinitum.


Stage 8:
Fill all of the gaps between the marzipan with more marzipan. I love marzipan, me - I just hope our guests do too!


Stage 9:
Wipe all excess jam, icing sugar and other assorted gunk from the cake board. Stand back and give a big sigh of relief. Tick "marzipan cake" off the To Do list.