Book stack cake

For my brother's 40th I wanted to make a really special cake (he is really special).  Originally I thought about making him a cake in the shape of a stack of bike gear cogs (he is mad keen on cycling), but after chatting to another baking friend, she came up with a better idea.  She suggested a stack of his favourite books.  He works in publishing, so a book theme seemed appropriate.

I decided to make each cake a different flavour and this allowed me to make one of them gluten free for my lovely Mum.  I consulted my sister in law about the books and so we decided on (from the bottom up) The Great Boffo (a childhood favourite about cycling), Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (one of the first books he was involved in selling at Bloomsbury), Wolf Hall (a book group favourite of his), Just My Type (a fabulous book about fonts) and a Wisden - obviously 1973 edition (he is also mad keen on cricket).  The cakes were (from the bottom up) Vanilla buttermilk, red velvet, coffee and walnut, lemon drizzle and gluten free vanilla.  

I made the bottom four cakes in advance and froze them, but I wasn't sure about freezing the gluten free one so I made that fresh. I iced each cake with buttercream and then fondant.  The ivory pages went on first, then rolled out the covers to overlap.  I placed each book onto a custom cut thin board. 

 Each of the cakes then had individual icing added.  I had tried to do a "run out" for The Great Boffo and the tudor rose on Wolf Hall. This involves tracing the outline with royal icing then filling in with thinned down royal icing.

I had a couple of attempts, but could never peel the run out off the greaseproof paper without the icing cracking.  Instead I traced the illustrations then pricked through with a pin to get an outline of where the royal icing should go.  

Then I transported the cakes to London (in the back of my car on a very hot day, over a lot of speed bumps).  The following day was the party and I was going to drive down from a conference and assemble the cake ahead of the party.  Unfortunately I was stuck in a traffic jam behind an awful car accident, so I was nearly 4 hours later than planned.  My lovely friends Lucy and El and lovely boyfriend Ian had assembled the cake for me by putting dowels into each tier.  James saw the completed cake before me:

I think he was pretty pleased!  This is what the final cake looked like: