Waka Ama paddle cake

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A  few weeks ago I made this cake for my friend Leisa's husband Scott, he was 33 years young. I agreed to make a cake before I knew what I had to make. The request was for a Waka Ama paddle. Thankfully Leisa emailed me a few photos to work from. I wanted to do a logo in the middle of the paddle that included the birthday boy's name and age. Waka Ama NZ generously emailed me some logos, which I had printed as edible images - I used one on the handle as well.  The cake flavour requested was carrot cake, I didn't want to carve carrot cake (or in reality knowing me any cake), so I splashed out on a new tear drop shaped tin - which I adore (Fat Daddio's tins rock!)

As I sat contemplating my photos of paddles, thinking about wood colours, I was pleased to have my Satin Ice colour mixing chart on hand, as without it, I would not have achieved such great tones. I did the centre brown panel first. It was 4 parts yellow to one part chocolate, it's a little hard to see in the photo, but it is marbled. When I had the centre dark brown strip on the cake, I kneaded all of that remaining brown together and added a small amount of it in to some ivory Satin Ice, using Julie's marbling technique shown in her video below. I then took the remaining fondant scraps and rolled them in to a handle. (The cake board is covered in blue Satin Ice)

I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. I received a message that the birthday boy loved it too. A paddle is certainly not easy to try to portray in cake, as in reality they are super thin, but I think his cake represents one well.