The girl turned 20 this week, but she hasn’t outgrown crazy birthday cakes. Her response when I asked her what she wanted this year was: How would you feel about making a hornwort (Anthocerophyta not Ceratophyllum)?

Well, that’s a gauntlet thrown, for sure. Hornworts’ thin, jelly-like ‘leaves’ and tall, narrow sporophytes do not lend themselves to buttercream icing. This called for a new technique.

I immediately thought of agar agar (a vegetarian gelatine substitute, for those who don’t know), which has the right sheen for a hornwort, and which I knew could be made into thin, textured sheets (I knew this because I’ve used it for creating texture on fake wounds … yeah, I do a lot of weird stuff.)

As I was looking up a good water:agar ratio for the consistency I wanted, I stumbled across the world of jelly cakes. I was immediately hooked. They look totally disgusting to eat (I hate jelly/jello, won’t use gelatine because it’s not vegetarian, and I think agar tastes like seaweed), but visually they’re amazing.

So when I found that my thin agar leaves were fiddly and a bit too floppy, I decided I would do a jelly cake and create my hornwort using jelly cake techniques. 

I spent two hours practicing with the jelly last week, making sure I could do it without all the specialised equipment the professionals use. Then I made the other components of the cake over the weekend. I first made the actual cake (because no way was I going to have only jelly cake to eat) using a new recipe. This turned out so awful, I made a second cake with a tried-and-true recipe because there was no way I could use the first. I made the fake moss (using a new technique I hadn’t used before), chocolate tree bark (again, something I hadn’t made before), and the icing (using an unusual recipe I had never used before). 

Then, on the girl’s birthday, I made the jelly hornwort and assembled the whole thing.

The result? Pretty ugly, and not very hornwort-like. Or bark-like, or moss-like. And the icing set up like glue …

But hey, you’ve got to try new things, right? On the plus side, I learned about jelly cakes. I learned that the specialised equipment the professionals use is probably necessary to do it well. I learned how to create a decent jelly from agar agar (I mean, as decent as any jelly can be—yuck!), which I could now use to create moulded shapes or other embellishments for future cakes. I learned how not to make chocolate tree bark, and that a certain cake recipe and icing recipe can be discarded. The fake moss was definitely more moss-like than previous techniques I’ve tried. It’s one that’s probably worth playing with and refining.

So I learned some things. And I got to eat cake. It may not be pretty, and the icing texture is simply wrong, but the flavour’s good.

And I have to remind myself that sometimes trying something new does work. Remember the octopus cake? Better luck next time.