Computer Cake

My sister-in-law asked me to make a cake for my brother's birthday...something to do with computers was what she asked for.
I looked in books and online but I couldn't find anything I felt I wanted to make, or thought I could make and it look good....to be honest I think computer cakes look pretty naff!
I did find one which was a screen with keyboard and mouse on a white cake which I quite liked, so I used this as inspiration.
I wanted to do a square cake but left it a bit late to get a square cake board, in the local shops they are all round. So I made an 8 inch round cake. It had been a busy week and I took the cake out of the oven just as it was time to pick the girls up from school. I poked it with a skewer and it came out clean so I left it and went out. When I got back the cake had sunk in the middle. On further investigation I saw that it had not cooked in the centre, when checking I'd put the skewer in slightly off center but there was an entire middle bit that was still runny. So I learnt some new things as this had never happened to me before.

• make sure you have plenty of time to cook your cake properly
• make sure you poke the skewer right in the middle as well as nearer the edges 
• you CANNOT successfully cook the middle of the cake alone
• if you try to cook the middle, it will take FOREVER and the rest of the cake will burn

So I started again. This time I had a lovely cooked round cake.

I then put the cake in the freezer wrapped in cling film, cakes are easier to cut when frozen.

The next morning I retrieved the cake and sliced it through the middle. I also trimmed the cake so that it was a nice even shape, thankfully it didn't need much. (the trimmings were frozen to make cake pops at a later date)

I filled the cake with buttercream, but first I broke a cocktail stick in half and put one in the top slice and one in the bottom so I knew exactly how to line the two halves up again after filling. This keeps the even shape.

Then I covered the cake in a thin layer of buttercream and covered it with 'ready to roll' icing in white.

The computer decorations I'd made earlier in the week so that they would be set/hard. The screen I  made from covering a shop bought marshmallow filled wafers with black icing. I decorated it with a  small square of white icing and wrote on it with writing icing. The keyboard I shaped out of black icing. My inspiration cake had a full keyboard set out but I decided to just put enough keys on it to spell out Happy Birthday, my brother's name and his age. The mouse was made with a small blob of white icing. To add a splash of colour I iced a blue ribbon around the bottom of the cake.

So here it is, my brother loved it but did complain that he couldn't get an internet connection on it!