I have been attending OddConUK now for five years now ever since I first went with my husband, one of the organisers, with our newborn baby. Still a lovely, friendly convention at which I trade and get to play some games, I wanted to do something special to mark the tenth year in my own way.

I had been helping redesign the website, but my health and my husband’s workload both conspired to prevent us from getting things done in time; however, I still had the odd bit of art I felt I didn’t want to miss out on using for the 10th year!

Most evenings, these days, leave me a little worse off with my health, but on one of the rare evenings in which I was feeling particularly energised, I put together this picture for t-shirts for the organisers to wear of a shoggoth chasing the convention mascot, Oddball, through a tunnel.

We had long talked about doing a cake. There had been one done back before I started going, but it was simply of Oddball. I felt that we needed to up the ante a little for the tenth year celebration.

I decided to have a stab at making it myself.

In total, the cake involved enough cake mix to make five whole cakes! Into a hollow within the centre of the sphere cake, an entire packet of Lindor milk chocolate balls was thrown and smothered with gooey chocolate cake filling. There was a lot of icing and red vegetarian food colouring involved with converting the sphere into the perfect body for Oddball. Set in place, I began the process of building the shoggoth having captured the poor mascot!

Four cakes went into the making of the sphere and a fifth was used to break and sculpt the body of the shoggoth on a skeleton of gingerbread. Unfortunately, the icing tool I had ordered to quickly do his fur didn’t arrive in time and I had to improvise techniques to create the fuzz look I wanted. In addition to several packets of variously coloured icings, half a packet of Lindor white chocolate balls went into making tasteful pustules adorning the beastie!

The cake was heavy, so in addition to the main raffle at the convention a separate, earlier draw exclusively for the cake was made to allow the winner, if they so desired, to share the cake with the convention. This is precisely what happened and the cake, indeed, fed all of the delegates in attendance.