Link to end view with zip
[link]

thank you sooooooo much for all the wonderful comments, favourites and watches!!!

I have read them all and am going to try and answer as many queries as possible but there seems to be so many now I am having problems.

So, I just wanted to say thank you for all your kind words, I really appreciate them!

I am flabbergasted to get a Daily Deviation! and very grateful!

New Description to answer the queries received most

If this new description doesn't help, please feel free to send me a note, and I will do my best to answer your queries.

The cake was made for a friend of mine for her mum (or mum in law?). They took the cake to a restaurant and brought it out with candles in it and she thought that her daughter had bought her a new bag Apparently she screamed the restaurant down when she found out it was a cake

It is 2 x 12" square 1 1/2" deep sponge cakes cut into ever decreasing rectangles, stacked, carved to the shape, covered with chocolate buttercream and covered with Renshaws chocolate sugarpaste to represent a Louis Vuitton hand bag.

To get the leathery look, The chocolate sugarpaste can be pulled around a little to get the creases you get in a back, plus I pleated it at the side bases, then you can polish it with a ball of the sugarpaste to get the sheen.

The details are painted on by hand (I got a picture off my friend and copied that) using Squires Kitchen edible gold lustre dust mixed with bronze lustre dust and diluted with isopropyl alcohol (or you can use gin or vodka).

The handles are made from Regalice sugarpaste with Gum Tragacanth added. I used a patchwork wheel to get the stitches effects and just modelled the rest by hand.

The badges were also pieces of regalice paste cut to shape and I scribed the logo in with a needle. The zip and padlock were just hand modelled. They were then painted with the same colours as the details.

I bet it was a nightmare to cut, cos it was about a foot tall and just over a foot and a half long, but my friend wanted to have good impact rather than having a small cake.

(Please do not use this image on other cake Companies websites. - sorry, have to say that, I get a lot of problems in the UK of people passing off my work as their own. sorry )

I started making cakes 12 years ago when I saw an awful cake in the supermarket and wondered if I could do better. Then friends asked me to make cakes and soon I had to set up properly.

I was self taught from books for the first 4 or 5 years, I also attended the Brtish Sugarcraft Guild for inspiration, then the local college asked me to teach, so for two years, I went to evening classes and studied beginners sugar flowers and cake decorating to get the certificates.

It took a long time to get accepted as most good cake decorators are taught in culinary schools and have really good food backgrounds. I studied as a musician really, and never thought I would be a cake decorator by trade.

I am a demonstrator for the British Sugarcraft Guild and also write occasional articles and teach at the exhibition for Squires Kitchen Sugarcraft. This year I am teaching two classes of chocolate craft (an experiment, the college hasn't run one of those before ) and Level one and Level two sugarcraft/sugarflowers and novelty cakes.

I hope that answers all the questions, I couldn't believe the amount of messages etc this morning, then when I found out it was a Daily Deviation I practially screamed my shop down

Thank you so much for all your wonderful comments, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading them!!!!


original bag design by (C) luis vuitton - I do not own the design of the bag, I just made the cake