Ukulele cake

So, I play the ukulele, as do many of my friends these days. It's one of my favorite things in the world. For my friend Jasmine's birthday, I decided to build a ukulele cake. This turned out to be a pretty easy (and fun!) project which I made with a little help from other uke-playing friends, Vichu and Lou. (You can see Vichu crumb coating the cake in the small photo. Lou iced the neck with chocolate fudge icing.) Overall, I'm pretty happy with the finished result even though it could have been neater if I'd had more time.

Basically, we baked a sheet cake and a few small loaf-sized cakes. I only ended up needing one of those, for the neck. The headstock is made using one of the leftover bits I carved off of the sheet cake when I cut the body of the uke. The pattern for the uke body was made by tracing my Mahalo ukulele, and then I transferred that to the cake by punching around it with a knife.

The tuning knobs are lollipops and the bridge is a section of a chocolate bar. The soundhole is made using cocoa powder sprinkled into a ring mold (Vichu's idea, which worked great, although cocoa powder went everywhere when Jasmine blew out the candles!). Everything else is pretty much frosting, dyed green or piped.

Also, I think the finished cake with burning candles has kind of a Jimi Hendrix thing going on!