• jake jake
• chocolate cake chocolate cake
• mush! mush!
• ship building ship building
• getting there... getting there...
• x marks the spot x marks the spot
• sail away sail away
• done! done!
• birthday boy! birthday boy!
•  

March 2016 cake for my nephew & godson Griffin. I had never heard of Jake and the Neverland Pirates before this... Still haven't seen the show, but he was excited for this cake!

Party was on a Sunday, so started on that Friday night - baked a chocolate 9x13 cake and a vanilla 9x13 cake. Even though the toothpick test came back clean, the vanilla cake caved in while cooling and was mush. Had to dump that in the garbage and baked a new cake the next morning.

The ship took a bit of carving - channeling the Cake Boss here... Wasn't too hard but some of the cake started crumbling at the corners, so I was grateful for some flexibility with the structure.

The brown frosting for the ship was a fluke - the brown food dye made the frosting a light brown... then I added black which turned the color an ugly camo green. Lots of red dye and the rest of the ounce of brown dye and it somehow turned out perfect. Do not add black when trying to make a dark brown frosting!

The "sand" is made from Nilla Wafer crumbs. I crumbled way more crumbs than needed.

Black frosting requires a lot of dye. Like the entire 1 ounce container. And that was on top of the brown chocolate buttercream.

The "water" was another fluke... I intended to have more defined waves and watched a tutorial on youtube where they slapped on white for the white caps... I think since the area I was working in was so small, I was afraid I'd end up with blue on the ship. It was easier just to mix in some white frosting with a toothpick.

The sails I created in photoshop and printed out. A wooden dowel from Home Depot made the perfect for the mast - if I had more time, I would have painted that but the natural wood looked fine.

After struggling with tinting the fondant red for the side strips and X, I was not looking forward to mixing up some black fondant. Back to Michaels to buy pre-made black fondant. With a project this size, that was one of the smartest moves I made. Those porthole windows were stuck to the side with edible adhesive... which was not thick enough for vertical work but did hold up - bumpy ride and all.

Griffin said his favorite part of the party was blowing out his candles and eating his "ship" cake! I love you Choops!