The sliceable circus

This is a bit of a ridiculous project - I had the idea ticking away in my head for ages but wasn't sure how to do it. I've always liked cakes with patterns inside - I do a lot of marbling, and have been following Ivan Day's history of the Battenberg cake with interest - so the idea of being able to slice open a cake and get a picture was pretty enticing.

As usual I overcomplicated and decided to do three different animals.

I coloured and baked the batter first, then cut it into the right shapes, spreading melted chocolate round the edges to hold them together, and putting bits of coloured icing in for eyes.

Then I put a layer of green batter with bits of biscuit in it to look like hay, lined up the animals in the tin, and poured the purple batter over to be the background. Unfortunately the animals were really fragile and bits kept dropping off, and had to be stuck on with lots of chocolate.

I iced the outside to look like a circus wagon, which of course involved maximum sweets and glitter - I thought there was no point being understated since its such a ridiculous concept. Sadly glitter never photographs well.

And it sort of worked! Maybe its the circus's hospital wagon, because there are repairs in evidence on all the animals - but I still think you can pretty much tell what they are.