Hi, I'm new here and am hoping to make my partner a birthday cake. We are huge speedway fans so I am getting a topper made of one of the riders for him. Our team colours are black and gold so I'm looking for simple but good ideas of cakes to make? I was thinking a nice sponge cake with black and gold striped icing or a criss cross - anyone got any other ideas?

Maybe making checkered flags or a race track to put around the sides or even cover the whole thing in fondant in a checkered flag pattern with some gold trim/writing etc.

Thanks for that idea, I'm not really wanting to use fondant though - I'd rather use sugarpaste icing if possible - any ideas how I can use it to make the cake checkered? I would quite like to do that with gold trimming round the bottom.

Im not sure what you mean, sugarpaste is usually another term for gumpaste which is edible in terms of food safety but it will harden like a rock so it usually isnt eaten or used to cover a whole cake. When you say sugarpaste icing do you mean buttercream?

If you just want to do the cake in buttercream frosting, you can frost the cake all over in white and then make a slight indentation of a grid pattern gently onto the buttercream with a straight edge once the frosting has crusted (this will give you a guide to follow). Then take chocolate buttercream that has been tinted black (if you try to tint white it will require too much coloring and probably ruin the taste so start with chocolate) and fill in every other square OR you could use modeling chocolate tinted black, roll it out and cut it into squares and just place them onto the buttercream cake in a checkered pattern.

If this is too intimidating, you could BAKE the cake in a checkerboard pattern which will come out with checkerboard chocolate and white cake when you cut it and just frost any way you want. If you like this idea, google "checkerboard cake" and youll find lots of tutorials