So the new series of The Great British Bake Off is about to start. Its comfort television at its best and I love it but it always leaves me feeling hungry and craving something calorific!

I do enjoy a bit of baking myself but apart from the occasional batch of biscuits or school holiday cake making fun I don’t get a chance to do much of it these days. But when it comes to birthday cakes then I always make the extra special effect to make them from scratch. Ever since the children were tiny I’ve made their birthday cakes, I quite enjoy it really although the children’s requests have changed over the years from Disney Cars and cute animals to more elaborate Minecraft and characters from fairytale books . Gone are the days when I can cover the whole cake in chocolate buttons or chocolate fingers. I’m not that great at icing and more than happy to admit it.

Now a few years ago my daughter was having her birthday party at an ice-cream parlour with all her friends from school. As usual I asked her what kind of cake she would like to which she replied ‘I’d like an ice-cream cake please’. Hmmm this was going to be interesting. After looking through all my trusty recipe books I searched for pictures on the internet only to find that anti-gravity ice-cream cakes were the current trend. I decided to improvise and create my own idea of an ice-cream cake. That would surely be much easier?

I decided upon rainbow colours, sprinkles, giant lollipops, ice-cream wafers and ice-cream cones. It was going to be a rainbow ice-cream themed cake; I mean how hard could it be?! I’d watched Rosanna Pansino, aka Nerdy Nummies, make one on YouTube and she make it look so easy!

A few days before the party I set to work. Two nights of baking later I had six different coloured cake layers. Now I was on to the fun bit, the construction. Actually the stacking of the layers did turn out to be quite easy but covering it in buttercream proved to be more difficult. The layers kept slipping and the buttercream was full of multi-coloured cake crumbs. I decided that this should be the ‘crumb coat’ as Rosanna Pansino called it as it was mainly that anyway. The next layer of buttercream was much more successful but now I was on to the sprinkles. How would I get the sprinkles all over the cake? All advice online was to roll the cake in the sprinkles but I had six layers so there was no way my cake was going to roll without falling apart completely. So I opted for the next best option and that was to throw handfuls of sprinkles at the cake. Literally. Well it actually worked and I had a layered rainbow cake covered in sprinkles as was the table, floor, me and generally the whole kitchen!

The result though was worth all the effort as on party day we had one very happy birthday girl when the cake was revealed and it tasted pretty good too, so success!

Will I be applying for The Great British Bake Off anytime soon though? Not a chance, but I will continue to write fun children’s books!