My friend Ann asked me if I could make a cake for her father in law's 80th birthday.  He's a sheep grazier, so Ann and her husband thought a sheep cake might be in order.  I started picturing one large sheep, three-dimensional.  Nah, too hard.  Then I wondered if I might be able to do a sheep in a paddock with some sky and maybe a sun.  Hmmm… easier.  And then I remembered I had six little pie dishes in my cupboard of baking stuff and all of a sudden I thought – FLOCK!

So here's what happened next:

And then I started making lots of white icing.  Like, twice as much as I would usually make.

I had to throw away the 25kg box of vegetable shortening after it turned to liquid that day I made the Harry Potter cake and it was a hundred degrees in my kitchen.  So I bought some Crisco from usafoods.com.au and for the first time I learned what's in vegetable shortening.  I wont tell you, because I don't want to upset you.  But DON'T KID YOURSELF THAT IT'S A GOOD SOURCE OF CALCIUM or anything like that.  Anyway.  Moving on.

This is two slab cakes side by side (actually, it's one plus two thirds of another).  One was in the oven for the prescribed 50 minutes, and the other was in the oven for an hour and twenty minutes on account of me forgetting about it while I read The Pioneer Woman.  So in case you were wondering if it's possible to overcook a slab cake?  Apparently not.

The first little sheep begins to take shape.

After this, there was a flurry of activity and I was unable to stop and take photographs, so you'll have to take my word for it that I did all this, and that I didn't just click my fingers and make it magically appear:

In the end I decided four sheep maketh a flock.  I gave three of them legs, and one is sitting on the ground.  Stay with me, people, they'll start to look like sheep in a minute.

At this point I had to pop out to the shops for sheep's ears, and as PJ was at the Brumbies and it was 9.30pm I asked Andrew from next door to come and be in the house for twenty minutes to scare away the Baddies.  He came in and asked why I was making a cake with tugboats.  Fair question.

A fleet of tugboats.  With green sky.

Baaaaaaa!!!!!!

I know they look a little bit like Yorkshire Terriers, but I still think they're pretty cute.

And here's the finished product.  I know they look perfectly harmless, but too many mouthfuls of these little babies and you're on your way to the coronary care ward.  I hope Les only had a little slice of sky, and that he let one of the grandkids lick the icing off for him first.

If you want a sheep cake, I'm your gal.  Or a Yorkshire Terrier cake.  Or a tugboat cake.  Or clogged arteries.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LES!