Tobias and Ash both love Vans, so what better than a Vans cake? (Thanks Sarah & Kamara for the suggestion!)

I decided that the cake should be as chequered as the icing, so assembled strips of chocolate and vanilla cake to make a block from which I would carve the sneakers. I also needed to figure out how to make the checkered icing have squares that actually looked square. After doing a small proof of concept, I decided to cut out small white and black squares from very thin fondant, and lay them on a thin layer of white fondant. It is amazing quite how many hours it took to make a sheet large enough for the shoes!!