I've never seen an edible greenhouse before. Gingerbread houses with sugarglass windows, yes. But since I love making life complicated my original plan for a vegetable patch birthday cake was hothoused into a mad sugar structural challenge. I made the frame out of chocolate gingerbread, rolled out and cut to shape, then filled the holes with crushed glacier mints before baking, then glued the whole thing together with more melted chocolate.
Sugarglass doesn't last long before it gets sticky and melts, so I made it the morning the cake had to be transported to my Aunt's garden party - in a marquee right by her actual greenhouse. You can't really tell in the photos, but I filled it with marzipan "plants" - seedlings in pots, aubergines and cauliflowers. And there's a tiny marzipan replica of one of her cats, sitting by a pot of pansies.
The soil is crumbled gingerbread (left over from making the greenhouse frame) and the stones are hazelnuts. And because life wasn't complicated enough already, I decided to make multicoloured chocolate leaves to decorate the sides. I painted melted chocolate onto real (washed - authenticity only goes so far here) leaves from the park, left it to set, then carefully pealed off the leaf to leave a delicately veined chocolate leaf.
You can't tell in the photos, but the whole cake was sparkly with edible gold powder - unfortunately, this fairy dust wasn't magic enough to prevent the cake from meeting with a horrible accident en route to the party...
A huge chasm opened up in the middle of the cake - a falling box had skewed the layers so they slid out from under the greenhouse in chunks, scattering icing and crumbs. My sister kindly took me on an emergency dash to Lidl to buy more hazelnuts and a huge pot of Nutella, and I used them to fill up the chasms. Amazingly, the greenhouse stayed in one piece, but the leaves crumbled to autumnal dust.
A few people asked if I'd learned a lesson from the whole experience, and muttered darkly about assembling on site. Well, maybe. But I think my strongest resolution is to make a marzipan witch to go along with the pumpkins next time, to defend her property against natural disasters.
