The Nunney Castle Steam Train

I have a friend called Rob, we used to be at school together and I'm really rather fond of him.  Nowadays he lives in Costa Rica saving sea turtles from poachers and making sure they all have a good start in life.  It really is quite honourable if you ask me.  

Anyhow, all the way from Costa Rica Rob got in touch and asked me to make his dad a cake for his impending 70th birthday.  

He asked if I could make a replica of the Nunney Castle Train that used to travel through his dad's home town of Skewen when he was just a nipper.  

Well, it was a pleasure!  

To make this cake I knew I would need a length of wood to raise the cake off the board so I popped over to my crazy wood lady to have a nose around in her shed.  I took Rob's pictures of the train and my cake board so we could make sure that we got the right sized piece, and I'm glad I did as my crazy wood lady's husband just so happens to be a train enthusiast (this had apparently completely slipped my mind) and amazingly produced from a room full of train-y things a book full of train blue prints, including the Nunney Castle along with a miniature scale model of the EXACT train, he even had a tiny bit of track!  

He was kind enough to let me take these three precious information giving objects home with me to work from, on the promise that I would get no sugar type products anywhere near them!!  

I couldn't believe my luck, normally I would search the web to find as many photos of said object from as many different angles as possible along with digging out dimensions online too and create the cake whilst flicking through about a million different print outs trying to get every detail as accurate as I can but this time it was all there in front of me... it felt like it was meant to be...

Here's Ieuan's Nunney Castle Train Cake, it was made from traditional vanilla sponge and yummy raspberry jam!

According to Rob's information his dad absolutely loved it and was teary eyed!! 

P.S. If saving sea turtles from poachers pulled at your heart strings and you'd like to help the cause you can check out the project here.  You can even adopt a turtle!  I did, and I called her Luna, she had little babies which hatched under the safety of the project and were then set free to start their incredible life journey, the project hope to see the females again in 20 years time ready to lay their own eggs :)