The top-LH and bottom-RH cakes are sponge cake, the other two are fruit cake. The sponge cake is suitable for vegetarians, and the fruit cake is suitable for vegans -- and both are dairy free.

The decoration was a bit of a challenge this time, if only because it involved so much purple -- for some reason purple seems to be a very difficult colour to mix with food-colourings. I knew I should have bought that violet colouring-paste. I was (eventually) quite pleased with the lettering for "something wonderful..." -- I got the 'ransom note' effect by tracing letters in various different fonts/sizes from a stack of old newspapers. Unfortunately the yellow (and by extension the orange) leaked rather -- I blame the all-natural colour, which I hadn't tried before. Anyway, I was still frantically decorating until about 2 hours before we set off for Coventry; the fact that I couldn't decide what to do with the two eventually-matching cakes didn't help. I eventually decided to risk the black background, which gave me a chance to use the edible silver glitter dust. SHINY CAKE!

Cutting the cake, still in full masquerade gear. You can just make out the "suitable for vegetarians" symbol drawn onto the side of the cake.

Skirt: £15 in C&A sale.
Back-laced PVC top: £10 from Cambridge Market.
Chains for lacing: less than £5 from B&Q.
Long gloves: £10 from John Lewis.
Mask: less than £5 from joke/magic/costume shop on Bridge Street, Cambridge.
Collar: ditto.
Silver hairspray: ditto.
Smile: relief at finally being able to stop stressing about cake.