Fondant Motorbike Cake Topper

One of Rob's work colleagues recently celebrated his 40th birthday, and I was asked to make a fondant motorbike to go on top of his birthday cake.

FYI, Rob's work didn't just have cake to celebrate. Everyone had fish and chips for lunch, more party food than they could handle, and a Wii and Kinect were set up in the back office. I arrived just in time to fail miserably at Kinect tennis. These damn kids with their hula-hoops and Pac-Man video games...

Anyhoo, I asked Rob what kind of motorbike his colleague had - a 2012 Bonneville Triumph, apparently. Which means nothing to me (I just know it looks black and pretty and shiny) but I'm sure bike enthusiasts will be able to relate - and we googled some pictures and found this:  

So we blew up the picture as big as we could and turned Rob's mighty computer screen to face me, where I sat on the couch and attempted to re-create the bike in fondant by copying the image from the computer.

Here's the finished result:

I tried to make it as close to the model as I could - while keeping it all in one piece! It's not exactly as, erm, sleek as the real thing, but I've been assured it looks like a bike. Which is important when you're making a bike cake topper. I say 'assured' because, much like when you say a word over and over and it begins to lose all meaning and you start to wonder if it's even a real word, the longer I worked on this bike the more sure I was that it looked like a nondescript blob. But the birthday boy was well chuffed so I was very flattered :)

I also added a few little details, like indents for 'padding' on the seat cover, and red and orange food colouring for the back lights:

The motorbike cake topper was also the début of my first ever edible food pen - which turned out to be a very lacklustre experience, indeed. (For those unfamiliar, edible food pens are like textas/sharpies you can use on fondant). Well, I managed a few details with my pen, but nothing like I had envisioned. It seemed to be constantly running out of 'ink', and wasn't nearly as miraculous a baking companion as I had imagined.

Sigh... You live and you learn. I may just have to save the pen for fiddly eyes and such - I'm sure it could handle that :)