May 31, 2020

It will be the 5th birthday of the UK ORCID consortium later this summer. The planned meeting won’t now go ahead so the organisation challenged us to make a cake for their birthday - it can be real or faked (https://jisc.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/jisc-uk-orcid-5-year-cake).

Given the shortage of flour in the Covid lockdown and my limited cake baking skills, I decided to do a bit of stash diving and see what I could come up with via crochet.

I used an old CD storage tin as the framework for the cake and crocheted a circle to the same diameter of the lid. I then worked a row through the back loops of the stitches to get it to change direction and kept crocheting in rounds until it was the right length to cover the height of the CD tin. I created my fancy icing by doing bobbles along the bottom edge of the tin and at the junction at the top of the tin.

I managed to find some bright green yarn but it was a super chunky weight. I untwisted the 3 plies of the yarn to give me something thinner to work. I made another smaller circle in green as a motif for the top of the cake. The lettering is made from a simple chain wiggled into the right position to make the letters and then stitched down. I made a chain from the green yarn to create the side decoration. The flowers were added to try and give some texture. I put some green stitches in the centres to carry on with the green theme.

Our team’s mascot is a crocheted Centaur that I made previously (https://ravel.me/gertie1103/cap). I decided to create a balloon with the number 5 on it for the Centaur to hold. This was from a free pattern on the internet https://www.amigurumitogo.com/2018/11/toy-crochet-balloon.... I made the larger size and then stuck a drinking straw in the neck of the balloon to make it stand up. The number was backstitched freehand with some white cotton yarn.

So here we have a faked cake for the birthday of a UK consortium dedicated to persistent identifiers for researchers.

https://ravel.me/gertie1103/bc