How to Make a Pirate Ship Cake and Treasure Chest Cake

What young boy doesn't want a pirate ship for a cake?  And what party of kids don't want to devour a treasure chest made of cake and candies?  There are many wonderful pirate ship examples on the internet which I pondered.  The final choice was made by my son, though, who liked the look of a pirate galleon.  So here's my novelty pirate ship cake!

Pirate ship and treasure chest cake

This is an easy cake to put together.  The longest part is in the decorating - as always.

How to Build a Pirate Ship Cake

1.  I made 2 rectangular cakes (13x9 in.).  Chocolate seemed appropriate, as any crumbs coming through the frosting would be more wood-like.

2.  To get a substantial ship, I trimmed about 3 inches off the length of both cakes, making them each 13x6 in. rectangles.  

3.  Cut one cake into 3 pieces:  approximately 3x9, 4x9 and 5x9 (or 6x9, depending how much space you want between the rear deck and the foredeck).

4.   Stack the trimmed 13x3" pieces on top of the remaining 13x6" cake, holding it together with jam or frosting (I prefer jam - it's a little less sweet than frosting everywhere).

5.  Use the other trimmed pieces of cake to fill in the deck before stacking the top decks.

6.  Stack the short pieces as shown above, so the rear deck has two levels.  Trim the front of the cake into a "U" shape, making sure that you trim all the way to the bottom, sloping in at an angle (this works best if the cake is frozen).

With all the weight on the back of the cake, it tended to lean backwards, so I propped it up with a wedge of cake underneath the rear.

7.  Crumb coat the cake with chocolate frosting.

8.  Frost the entire cake in dark brown chocolate frosting.  I used a fork dragged through the frosting to give a plank-like look.

9.  Add the decor - railings, sails, cannons, etc.  I made the railings out of marzipan, tinted bright yellow. I rolled several ropes of the marzipan, cutting smaller sticks for the upright rails and keeping long ropes for the hand railing.  It would have been better if I had used pieces of toothpicks and rolled marzipan around them for the railings, but I didn't think of that until after.

10.  Stick the railings around the ship, then place the top railing, pinching at the joints to secure.

11.  Sails were made from chopsticks (can also be bamboo skewers) and paper sails.  The pirate sail template was downloaded from the internet, printed on white paper, cut out and run onto the masts.  Flags were cut out of the same paper.  

12.  I used Rollos as the cannon holders on either side of the ship.  Candles were stuck into them for cannons and lit at the party.  Two Rollos put together make great barrels for the deck, and malt balls piled up are fantastic cannon balls.

13.  Add any other decorations you like - windows, pirates (I couldn't find my son's small plastic pirates so I went plain), swords...

14.  Tint more frosting blue and spread roughly around the ship as the ocean.  Populate the ocean with gummy crocodiles, sharks or fish - whatever you can find!

Of course, a pirate ship is not complete without a treasure chest somewhere!  I decided to add one on an island of it's own (easily transportable on a plastic plate).  

How to Make a Treasure Chest Cake

1.  Bake or buy a small loaf cake.  I used a mini queencake loaf.  Any yellow cake or pound cake will do.

2.  Cut the top off cleanly, just below where it starts to mound.  This will be the lid.

3.  Scoop out the middle of the cake in a square.  Crumble what you remove and use it as sand on the beach.  Place the treasure chest on top.

4.  Ice both pieces with chocolate frosting.  It is not necessary to frost the inside of the chest cavity.  Rake with a fork, as you did the ship, to look like wood planks.  Place the lid so that it looks like the chest has just been opened.

5.   Add blue frosting as ocean lapping on the beach.

6.  Fill the treasure chest with candy treasure!  M&Ms, Rockets, Skittles, chocolate gold coins and silver decorating balls all make good treasure.  Use silver balls to make ropes of silver throughout the chest and dripping over.

Set it on the party table and watch the kids enjoy devouring it!

Backhoe Cake - the easy way!

Once in awhile I just can't figure out how to do a 3D cake, or I just don't have the time, or a 2D will do just fine!  When one son turned 2, he wasn't really at the age to appreciate 3-dimensional cake work; he thought anything sweet was great!  So I made a simple backhoe cake.  (Is this a true backhoe?  I think perhaps the digger should be in the back and a scoop in front.  But the 2 year old didn't know!)

Procedure:
1.  Bake a cake in a 13"x9" pan.  Any kind of cake will do!
2.  Make frosting/icing.  Basic buttercream is fine.  Divide into 3 or 4 portions and color as desired.  As you can see, I used blue, pale yellow, bright yellow and grey.  (I didn't yet have black food coloring so couldn't get a good black for the outline and tires.)
3.  Draw a backhoe, or print a drawing of it and cut out.  I drew mine freehand from pictures - whether I looked at good pictures, or am a good freehand drawer is not the debate here!  It's just for fun, and will be eaten in a few minutes anyway!)
4.  Put the cut out on the cake and use a knife to trace the outline.
5.  Fill in the big areas with yellow frosting.
6.  Using a star tip on a decorator's tube, pipe in the sky and the sand.
7.  Go over the traced line with grey or black frosting, piped through a decorator's tip (small round tip).
8.  Pipe in a steering wheel and tires.
9.  Use chocolate vermicelli and sprinkle under the backhoe to make dirt.
10. If desired, use a few dabs of white frosting to make fluffy clouds.

Ta da!

Obviously, you can be much more creative than this.  
One very simple way would be to make a basic sheet cake (or cake in a pan) and frost it to resemble dirt, or a field, or a road, then put small toy construction vehicles on top.  Some places sell them specifically as cake toppers, but any new (or clean) toy will work.  


 Or put a backhoe toy on the cake, on a road, perhaps with a Hot Wheels car coming the other way, and make sure these adorable construction cone candles are on the cake warning the oncoming traffic!











Want to just have the whole cake as the vehicle?  Then try a pan made for the occasion, like this Wilton Dump Truck Pan.

Easter Cake

Easter tomb cake

OK, this may not be the most creative novelty cake, but I wanted something quickly for the cast of an Easter play.  I made a round layer cake and frosted it yellow (being a good spring color), but thought it was too plain.  Since the play dealt with Easter (the cross, the tomb, resurrection), I grabbed some leftover marzipan, mixed it with some cocoa powder and shaped it to look rock-like.  Grabbed some white flowers to complete the decoration.  (I guess the main part of the tomb is off the cake - this is just the rock that was rolled away from the entrance!)

How to make a Cat Cake

This cake has probably been my favorite to make, even if there's room for improvement in my sculpting and fondant skills!

cat on a present cake

My eldest son loves cats and decided on a cat cake for his birthday last year that looked like his own cat.  There are lots of pictures and instructions for 2-dimensional cat cakes online, but I have a weakness for trying to figure out 3D cakes, so I did some searching.  There aren't too many examples of 3D cat cakes out there, but those that are pictured are amazing!  I don't pretend to be anywhere in the class of some of those cake decorators.  Like I've said before, I'm just a mom having fun with cake designs.  (Call it my inner child!)  This was also only my second time working with fondant, which I have to make from scratch  (here's a link to a fondant recipe I've used.)

How to Make a Cat Cake
Step 1:  The Present
This is simply a 9x13 cake of your choice.  I used chocolate - always a favorite!
a.  Place the cake on a tray or cake board and crumb frost.
b.  Roll out your tinted fondant and drape over the cake.  Smooth it over the cake, using a cake knife or something flat to help get sharper edges (something I didn't succeed at too well!).
c.  Trim the fondant that is overhanging at the bottom of the cake.
d.  Decorate the present with different colored fondant polka dots and a fondant ribbon (strips of fondant put together in a ribbon shape:  here's a good site that tells you how.)

Step 2:  The Cat Cake
I took the easy way out with the cake and bought one large and one small round Queen cake, which is a good dense cake that won't disintegrate when carving.  Alternatively, you can make your own 8" or 9" round cake and a 4" round (basically an oversized cupcake).
a.  Cut a semi-circle out of one side of the large round cake that is the size of the head of the cat (the small cake).  A word of caution:  I ended up with a head that was a bit oversized for the body, so measure a cat to see the proportion of head to body and cut down the cake for the head accordingly.
b.  Carve a slight ditch on the top of the large cake, from where the head will be to the middle.  This will be joint of the leg and body of the sleeping cat (see the picture).

building the cat cake

c.  Put the head in place and carve the face of the cat.  This is done simply by carving concave shapes on either side, leaving a nose bridge in the middle.  Under the nose, shape the cake in an angle inward to the ground.  I should have carved the head also along the jawline, making it trimmer and smaller for a sleek cat head.

d.  Crumb coat the cake with frosting to help the fondant hold.
e.  Transfer the cat onto the present (unless you feel able to slide the finished cat onto the present without breaking anything).  I did put the fondant on the body of the cat and the head of the cat separately, transferred them to the present and then joined the fondant at the neck, smoothing it out.
f.  Roll out your fondant (I used plain white) and drape it over the cat's body, smoothing it with your hands so that the dip for the joint is clearly seen.
g.  Drape fondant over the cat's head, smoothing it with your hands so that the curves of the cat's head and face are clearly seen.
h.  Join the head and the body at the neck, smoothing out the fondant.

cat cake fully assembled

i.  With extra fondant, roll out a tail, shape two front paws and two ears.  I made the ears the day before so that they would be hard by the time I put them on the cat.  Drape the tail around the cat, joining the fondant of the tail with the back of the cat.  Place the paws on the front of the cat.  Place the ears on the head.  I used a brush with a bit of water to make the fondant gummy where the ears would stand.

Almost done!

j.  Decorate the cat as you please!  Not having airbrushing equipment, I used a regular paintbrush dipped into a food coloring mix to paint my cat.  To paint on fondant, you need to use lemon juice or alcohol (such as vodka) to mix with the food coloring.  This will evaporate leaving only the color, and won't disintegrate the fondant.  I mixed cocoa powder with lemon juice, and black Wilton's gel paste.

The finished cat cake

I couldn't find anything great for the whiskers so ended up using pieces of spaghetti.  Not the greatest, but it got the idea across!  And it was a huge hit with my son's class!

Christmas Dirt Cake!

One other very popular addition to the poinsettia-themed Christmas party was the wonderful dirt cake.  It's particularly fun to spring it on people who have never heard of such a thing!  Such was the case at my cast party.  I had the poinsettia cake and poinsettia cookies on display, and in the middle of the table was a beautiful poinsettia plant in a pot.  (The poinsettia stems were very carefully wrapped in plastic wrap and then again in tin foil so that no sap would get out into the cake).  Everyone thought it was the plant from the play and was just nice decoration.  When it was time for dessert, I asked, "Who wants some dirt?" and dug the spoon into the pot.  I've never seen so many jaws drop!  When they actually tasted it, no one even thought of eating the poinsettia cake and cookies!  

 

Recipe for Dirt Cake (from Cooks.com):

1 – 1 1/4 lb. Package of Oreo cookies (or chocolate sandwich cookies, like Zero)

8 oz. Cream cheese

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 cup powdered sugar

3 cups milk

12 oz. Cool Whip (or sweetened whipped cream)

2 (3 1/2 oz) packages of vanilla or chocolate pudding

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Crush Oreos. Put 1/3 of the crushed Oreos into a new, clean flower pot. Set aside.

Mix butter, cream cheese and sugar and vanilla together. Set aside.

Combine milk and pudding mix. Fold Cool Whip into the pudding.

Fold together pudding mixture and butter-cream cheese mixture.

Layer this mixture (about 1/3 of it) onto the crumbled cookies in the pot. Next, add another layer of the pudding mixture, then another layer of cookie crumbs, continuing until all ingredients are used. Make sure that your top is layer is one of cookie crumbs.  It looks like nice, rich potting soil.

Chill in refrigerator for 3 to 4 hours before serving.  Wrap your flowers and stick them into the dirt cake before displaying and serving!



It's not your traditional cake, but it certainly is a novelty and it's a lot of fun!

Poinsettia Cake for Christmas!

Here is one of my favorite novelty cake designs - not because it is complicated or elaborate, but because I love the way it turned out!  The poinsettia part came after a lot of trial and error, but I'm happy with it.

When I wrote about the Christmas tree cake, I talked about the play that I was directing at the time - a poinsettia plant was a key prop in the play.  So for the cast party, I wanted to play on the theme of poinsettias by making a poinsettia cake of some kind.  I could have made a cake and cut it into petals and leaves then frosted it green and red, but that somehow didn't sound very elegant.  I wanted an elegant cake!  Looking around online, I saw a picture of a cake with a pointsettia on top, made from tinted white chocolate.  Perfect!  So I set to work.

All the recipes for making chocolate leaves seemed to call for lemon leaves coated with melted white chocolate, or tinted white chocolate.  I finally found a greengrocer who could bring me lemon leaves - but they were tiny!  I decided to try them anyway has they have a nice suppleness that will allow easy separation from the chocolate when dry.  I also tried larger fruit tree leaves, like guava and mango (I'm in the tropics, so that's what we have).  The lemon leaves did work beautifully, but they were too small.  The other leaves were too inflexible and the chocolate stayed in the veins or broke apart.  I also had a problem with the tinting -- when tinting white chocolate, you cannot use powder, liquid or even paste.  It needs to be an oil-based food coloring (something which is just not available in Kenya).  When I tried other types, the chocolate seized (became hard and crumbly).  I did try one method, using corn syrup and food coloring, and the chocolate didn't seize, but it didn't harden eventually either!  So I struck out with the idea of delicate chocolate leaves on top of a cake.

Browsing through the grocery shelves, I saw a box of marzipan.  I decided to see if I could work with that.  It worked beautifully!  It's rather like working with fondant, but I didn't have to make it.  So here's what I ended up doing:

1.  For the cake:  use cake of choice, in a double-layer round.  I made a chocolate cake, filled with raspberry jam.  I frosted it with a chocolate ganache, which gives a lovely, glossy smooth finish.

2.  Take some marzipan (I get it in blocks and just sliced off about 1/3 of the block) and tint it using a good red food coloring.  I used a Christmas Red gel.  Knead it in until it is a good even red color.

3.  Roll it out to about 1/4" thick.  Take a large leaf with well-defined veins (I used a mango leaf) and press it into the marzipan.  Remove.  Cut out around the veins so that you have a complete leaf.  Do this with a couple of different sizes of leaves:  4-6 large leaves, 3-5 smaller leaves.  

4.  Tint another portion of marzipan with green and use the same process to cut out 2-3 large green leaves.

5.  Arrange the leaves and petals on the cake, starting with the green leaves on the bottom, layering on the large red leaves and topping with the smaller leaves.  Leave a circle open in the middle.

6.  Roll untinted marzipan into small balls (6-7).  Place these in the center circle for the center of the poinsettia.  Voila!  An elegant poinsettia cake!

If you would rather have a shaped poinsettia cake, there are cake pans available.  Also think about the decorating theme -  poinsettia paper plates or napkins, or a poinsettia decorated cake plate.   I added to the poinsettia theme by making poinsettia cookies as well.   

I had just gotten my decorating tips and was still getting used to them when I made these cookies, but here are the steps:

1.  Make a sugar cookie dough.

2.  Use a large star shape cookie cutter to cut the background shape.

3.  Use buttercream frosting colored green, red and yellow.

4.  Use a leaf tip from a decorating kit.  Beginning with the red, pipe poinsettia leaves around the cookie, leaving a circle in the middle.  Allow the leaf pattern to bunch a little.  Pipe 3-5 green leaves on the outside, and finish with a straight tip making small yellow balls in the center circle.  Practice makes perfect, and I'm sure the more I use the decorating tips, the better I'll get at making beautiful leaves and other decorations! 

  

A Christmas Cake Idea

Since we're in the Christmas season, I thought it's a good time to share a Christmas cake idea.  It's another fun novelty cake design that is easy to make and gives great enjoyment to the receiver (or entire party!).  I was directing a Christmas play and the main actor's birthday happened during our rehearsal time. The mom in me wanted to do a birthday cake for him; the artist in me wanted to combine the birthday cake with the theme of Christmas and the play--Christmas trees featured in the play.  So here's a birthday cake idea for all those December babies, or just a fun novelty cake idea for the Christmas season!

I have a penchant for 3-D cakes.  Making a Christmas tree cake in the flat 2-dimensional design would have been easy, but I yearned for something more substantial.  Here's the Christmas tree cake picture:

The actual cake is easy to put together.  It is 5 layers of cake - pick your flavor!  I used chocolate and vanilla cakes.

To make and assemble:
1.  Use 2 cake recipes for round cakes.  Bake the cake in round pans of decreasing size.  The top portion of cake is cupcake size.

2.  When the cakes are cooled, stack them on top of each other in decreasing size, with jam or frosting between each layer.  Use a bamboo skewer  down the centre to prevent the cakes from sliding.

3.  Crumb frost the stacked cakes if desired.

4.  Cut triangles out of each layer, alternating position, so that the "branches" come to a point.

5.  Use green-tinted buttercream frosting and pipe onto the cake with a star-tipped decorating tip.  Pipe in fairly short ribbons.  Start at the bottom of the cake and move upward by layer, letting each layer overlap the layer below.

6.  Decorate the cake with multi-colored candies, such as Skittles, Smarties, Rockets or M&Ms.  Gold and silver decorating balls work well too.  If you use a dark green food coloring, you can sift powdered sugar (icing powder) over the tree to look like snow in a forest.

7.  Cut leftover pieces of cake into cubes and frost with any color frosting (I used red) and decorate as presents.  I used Skittles for ribbons.

That's it!

But if you want more Christmas cake design ideas, check out the cake molds that are available.  I saw one that bakes the cake in two halves, then can be fitted together to make a 3-D Christmas tree cake.  Cool!


And I just have to put this link in as well for a fun looking gingerbread and Christmas tree mini pan!  There are too many fun cake decorating ideas and tools out there—I want them all!  Maybe I should open up a cake and cookie shop! The child in me wants all these fun toys for cake designs!  And novelty cakes (and cookies!) speak to the child in all of us, don't they?