Helen's German Chocolate Cruise Ship Cake

This past weekend was my soon-to-be cousin-in-law (is that a thing?), Helen's, bridal shower!

She and my cousin, Matt, met on a cruise a few years ago. Their romance has been centered around their love of travel and the open sea. :) Helen's shower theme was, of course, nautical. So, my aunt asked if I would create a cruise ship cake for them!

I was delighted and excited to help in any way I could! As usual, I ended up procrastinating and staying up far too late the night before the shower adding the finishing touches, but when I was finally done, I had made a pretty adorable cruise ship/tug boat ;) German Chocolate cake.

Jack-O-Lantern

It turns out, getting married takes up quite a bit of time, so I wasn’t able to get my creative cake juices flowing for a while. As it turned out, it was October - Halloween Time! In honor of Halloween, I decided to host an evening of pumpkin carving, which requires an appropriately themed cake.

This baby is all hand carved and, as per usual, covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. It was so much easier and took so much less time than I expected it to. My husband suggested I make a jack-o-lantern cake and I thought to myself, “He has got to be kidding me.” I was wrong to think it would be so difficult.

P-p-p-poker Cake

No so long ago the girl half of one of our couple friends asked me if I could do a poker themed cake for the boy half’s upcoming birthday party. I immediately thought I should make the cake into a miniature poker table and decorate it with fondant. So, after doing a little online research - I didn’t know if poker tables were octagons or hexagons - I put my sketch together and forgot about it for a while. 

I set to baking the Thursday before the party…and got excited and decided to go ahead and stack the layers and make the fondant that night too. Friday night I carved the cake into an octagon, which was really easy because of the markings that were still left on the cake from the folded parchment paper, and then covered it in black fondant. And Saturday I spent pretty much the whole day dying and rolling out fondant to cut into chips and cards, and then piping all of the detail onto them. 

I accidentally made the piping icing too thick, so I had to take a break after piping a handful of chips because my hand hurt so bad, but I thinned it out and got back to work. The below is the result of one full day and two evenings work.

Once Upon a Time...

This was the first cake that I was able to do any “carving” with. As you can (hopefully) see, there’s an indentation at the “crease” and the edges of the book taper out to emulate actual book pages.

The biggest thing about this lesson was that I learned how to make roses. To this day, I probably enjoy making roses out of icing way more than I should.