Horses head - without the Godfather implications!

A work colleague of Sue's had heard about my awesome(!) skills in the cake making department, and her daughters birthday was coming up, so she asked Sue if I could make a cake for her. "Of course!", we said, "why not?" may even have passed our lips. Hmmm.

So anyways, I go through the multitude of cakes books now at my disposal, and I find all of the horsey cakes I can. There's a relief of a unicorn prancing, and nice little 3D pony stable, a story book with a horse painted onto the pages, in short all the variations of horsey style things you can imagine. But wait, our customer has been unfaithful! Sue returns from work with the cake books, and a print out from some other cake shop of a horses head, saying "Can we have something like that please?". I mean... That's just dirty ;)

Anyways, I had some contract work on at the same time, so it was kind of like trying to fit all my normal life, plus working weekends & evenings, as well as making this cake into the 24 hours in a day. Let me tell you, I was knackered by the end of it all!

So, this is the final result... I'm not as happy with this as I could have been. It just didn't "work". I think half the problem is my total lack of experience with horses... I can't remember ever being really close to one, if I was, I wasn't terribly interested. I must admit that (contrary to what appears to be the rest of the human race) I find them ugly great hulking beasts and don't understand the attraction of them. As a result, horsey suffered. His ear gives him the look & feel of Dobbin the donkey, and unfortunately the nose (especially from front on) has a distinct resemblance to a kangeroo.

So, all in all. Not one of my best cakes. Sorry Lydia, I did try, but I hope you like it :S

Cake was a chocolate sponge with chocolate butter icing, by request ;)

P.S. The cake wasn't delivered on the silver backing board, I was just using it so that as I moved it around for decoration I didn't damage the edge of the green icing...

P.P.S. I did ask, but I wasn't allowed to do a Godfather style head... I had such great ideas for using candy sticks (you know the things that used to be called cigarettes until the world got all PC!) as tendons, and using lots of red colouring and varnish to show muscles and stuff... But it wouldn't have really been appropriate I guess :P