baking at last

My estimation is that I will need six lots of the Cakebook sponge recipe, made in batches of two, so 1300g of butter,

creamed with same of caster sugar,

same weight of self-raising flour added one spoon at a time with each of the 24 eggs,

poured into grease-proof-paper-lined tins (lesson learnt here: over-full tins do not result in extra tall sponge, but mixture all over your oven).

One of the six (egg shown for scale, not as a serving suggestion).

Result: a freezer full of sponge cake. Freezing means it can be made in advance, and, by all accounts, firms up the sponge making it easier to work with.

Each cake will be cut into slices 25mm wide and squared up into bricks. The cinema was made of fruit cake and one advantage was that it keeps well; the sponge cannot be constructed too much in advance because it will go stale, so looks like an early start on Saturday 25 June...

back from the shops...

President unsalted butter was on special offer, so that was a bonus.

All that needs doing is to turn this lot into sponge cake, sleeves rolled up here we go...

to the shops

More maths and some guess work gives me a shopping list that reads:


20 packs of butter
3kg icing sugar
4kg caster sugar
72 eggs
4kg self-raising flour
some milk


This is based on my estimate that I will need 6 times the basic Cakebook sponge recipe (halfway down the FAQs page), plus the associated buttercream icing.


Also needed is ready-to-roll icing: 3 big packs white, 3 medium packs dark brown, 1 medium pack light brown. The latter purchased from the otherworldly Hobbycraft in Team Valley. And while I was there I came across railway modellers’ grass, thus turfing the board in one easy go, with the aid of a scalpel and double-sided tape.

Baking at the weekend...

what's the time?

The Wills Building has a clock on the front. I thought it would be a nice touch if my clock actually worked.


I bought a kit for making CDs into clocks because of the size and also the style of the hands. Cut down to scale the hands will really look the part and, very happily, the mechanism is 25mm deep, which, you will remember is the thickness of my sponge bricks. So, all I have to do is fix it in place, remembering to fit the battery in first, and put icing on its face.

Although the actual clock has no second hand I will probably keep it on mine. After all, what's the point of having a working clock if no-one notices?

I might have to start baking soon, but first more shopping...

the interior structure

The cat has made a considerable contribution to the project. Cardboard boxes which held his food pouches have made the basis for most of the interior. Simply cardboard and sticky tape.

Next up: wrapping in foil. The whole thing will eventually be covered in butter icing to stick on the sponge, so, apart from hygiene, the foil will stop the card getting soggy. Now looking like a maquette for a Christo piece.

To the clock...

the plans

The Wills Building is big enough to be clearly visible on the satellite view of Google Maps. A few printouts, some tracing paper, a pencil, a ruler and 15 minutes later we have a plan.

Add some Googled images and Adobe Illustrator and we have a front elevation, mix in some schoolboy maths and there’s our scale.

these images are taken and styled in the Instagram app if you're interested

The maximum plot size for Cakebook2011 is 110cm, so I scaled my baseboard up to that, coming out at 41cm deep. The area includes the grass and road around the building, so the completed building will be 103cm wide. This does make it almost 3 times the length of last year's cinema, but it is still shorter (note to self: choose a tower or lighthouse next year).

Out to Wickes to buy a piece of mdf. Marked up, cut to size and sanded, it's ready for the plan.

Drawing the plan on the board I realised exactly how long and thin the cake was going to be. A little more maths and the ‘interesting’ bits are scaled up by a half. It could have been more, but I didn't want it to look caricatured; it's still shorter than the cinema though.

The cinema was solid fruit cake, but the Wills would be too big for that. My chosen construction is foil-covered cardboard box interior, sponge bricks and buttercream cement, with ready-to-roll icing veneer. 

The box construction needs to be a consistent amount smaller than the finished size, so I took 27mm off each measurement to allow for a thickness of 25mm of sponge and 2mm of icing. 27mm just happened to be the width of my metal ruler, so marking the box sizes was a matter of moments.

Plans done...