An 'absolutely' cool party

Luke is a guy I went to high school with, and today was his 21st birthday party. It was a great day actually, probably one of the better 21sts I've been to. I really did not know what to get him for his birthday (guys are always hard to buy for), so I decided to make him a cake, seeing as I had heard he wasn't planning to have one. As to deciding what sort of cake it would be, I had no problems: Luke absolutely loves aeroplanes (he's studying aerospace engineeering), and he loves the late Australian airline, Ansett. So I made him an Ansett plane cake.

It took a lot longer than I anticipated, but that's cool because I'm on holidays. I started off by cooking 2 cakes, a big thick one, and a smaller thin one. I then cut out a body, wings and a tail.



After that, I stuck it to the board with jam, and then iced it with glace icing. I realised soon after then that I had a problem: because the icing was white, the darker parts of the cake were showing through and it was going to take many layers of icing to cover that. So I decided instead to coat the icing with dessicated coconut.

A few marshmallows and some cool gel stuff later, and... ta da! A plane!



And from another angle...



A fair bit of work was involved, but Luke seemed to like it so it was worth it in the end. I wonder what I might attempt at the next party...?