Dr Cupcake and Miss Macaron: fondant trees and flowers

My beautiful co-worker, Kate, had a birthday recently, and we all love birthdays because it gives the whole office an excuse to take a minute out of our busy day to celebrate together. We've been enjoying some great weather lately, the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and it just seemed a good idea to make a spring garden cake.

I admit that this cake was produced in a bit of a hurry, since Katie had the bad timing to have her birthday on a Thursday (the best birthday day is clearly a Monday because you have the whole weekend to play at cake decorating). Also, Criminal Minds is on telly on Wednesday evenings. Kate was lucky not to end up with a 'murder scene' cake.

Rome wasn't built in a day, but this cake was. Inside, it's an orange cake made with ground almonds and marmalade. As soon as it was out of the oven and cooled down, I spread it with ganache all over the top and sides to smooth any dips or uneven bits.

While leaving the ganache to firm up, I made some flowers from orange and pink coloured fondant, rolled thin and stamped out with some different sized flower cutters. I used a ball tool to curve the flowers up and left them to harden.

Next I wanted some trees. These are halfway between a palm tree and something out of Dr Suess... not deliberately, just because I am not very good at trees.

I started with making different sized flower shapes out of rolled green fondant, for the canopy.

Then I made a cone of brown fondant and supported it by pushing a lollipop stick down the centre of it. I fixed a ball of green fondant on the pointy end and draped the layers of green canopy over the top, and left this to dry.

After I had made two trees and quite a few flowers (more than I needed - you can store these in an airtight container almost indefinitely), I wanted some clumps of long grass.

To make a clump of grass, take a small amount of green fondant and hand roll it into a little cone. Then, using a small pair of scissors, snip into the cone vertically to end up with six or eight points of 'grass'.

By this time the cake and its ganache coating was set and hard. I rolled out some light green fondant, large enough to cover the entire top and sides of the cake, and smoothed it on.

At this stage the trees, grasses and flowers just needed to be placed on their little lawn.

All the bits'n'pieces were fixed to the cake with a few drops of water.

I stuck some coloured cachous in the centres of the flowers for extra bling.

All that was left was to get the birthday girl to cut the cake! This is Kate holding the knife (and her security pass, bizarrely - maybe if you wave your pass and flash that beautiful smile Katie, the security guys won't mind that you have a large knife handy??)