Yes I am still here, just a bit slow in posting over the past month! CB & KV have told me off for not posting photos of my nephew's birthday cake... I'm glad that someone is reading this!
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| Pirate Ship |
The week before Christmas, I made my first pirate ship - I had grand plans of creating a desert island with trees and grass, but in the end the board wasn't big enough to hold it all! So instead, I covered the board in fondant - 2 colours of blue kneaded together to make the water swirly-looking and a section of yellow for sand, so that I at least had a similar effect.
My sister lent me a kid's birthday cake book so that I could get the shape of the pirate ship - all it is, is a big rectangular cake (I baked mine in a roasting tin), cut in half lengthways. Then a 7cm section is cut across the top so that you can make the bow and stern. It's pretty simple. The cake book said to add in skewers to hold it together, and then cover in buttercream. I wanted to try and make the icing look like wood planks, and so I covered it in brown fondant and drew in lines for the planks with a modelling tool (I swirled three different bits of brown fondant together, but kneaded it too much so you can't see the different colours. If I had kneaded the colours less, then it would have looked more like wood grain - apparently). I used drinking straws instead of skewers to hold it together (a tip from one of the cake shows that I watch!) as you can easily cut them to the right length, and there are no chances of splinters (you just have to warn people about the plastic - I use flourescent coloured ones so that you can't miss them!).
The rest of the decorating was easy - yes that is a curly whirly. A tip about using chocolate on cakes - the curly whirly melted on the the way to the party (all of a 15 minute drive), as did the chocolate plank. Make sure that you reinforce with toothpicks! I also bought some pirate candles and other figurines to add on. My hubbie made the wonderful paper sails. I was a bit worried that they might catch on fire from the candles, and so we took the sails down before lighting them!
The other thing that I tried, which my nephew LOVED, was to hide gold chocolate coins in the cake as treasure. Before assembling it all, I cut four small squares in the cake and stuffed as many chocolate coins in as I could. It was just a bit tricky guessing where to cut, so next time I will add in something as a marker.
Anyway - that's my pirate cake! I'm not sure when my next cake-making adventure will be.. I don't have any lined up for the next month or so that I know of, and we are moving house soon, so I hope I end up somewhere with a good oven!
Don't forget to keep sending me your cakes - I love seeing what people create.
-N-
