Pirate Ship Cake

The Pirate Ship Cake was for a little boy who was having a pirate themed birthday.
Its made with chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream and is decorated with chocolate brown fondant and teddy bear brown fondant for the decking.
With it being a cake for a little one I thought it best to use sweets to decorate the cake instead of all fondant so the railing is flake chocolate bars sat on top of small pieces of fondant and the guns are Rolo's stuck on with butter cream.
The mass is made out of paper and skewers that have been stuck in to cake picks and the little pirate was made out of fondant so it was edible.
Along with the cake they had ordered a batch of cupcakes half vanilla and half chocolate. To stick with the pirate theme I piped blue food coloured vanilla butter cream on to each cupcake and then made four different motifs: Skull and Crossbones, Treasure Map, Pirates, and Islands. It felt like the cupcakes took longer to decorate than the cake because the motif were so small but worked really well.

Narnia Cake

The Narnia Cake is based on 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' movie. It's a checker board vanilla and chocolate sponge and I found the best way to do that was to bake them both separate (otherwise it would be marble cake unless you have a divider tin) and then thirded each cake, sticking them together with chocolate butter cream.
The Wardrobe I made with madeira cake as it was standing up so it needed to be strong enough to stay standing once all the fondant went on.
The figures and the lamp-post were the only parts that were non edible as the person who ordered it wanted to keep them after the cake was gone.
The trees are made with green fondant and mint matchsticks, it works alright but I found that a couple of the matchsticks broke with the weight of the fondant. If anyone reading this blog has any other tree making methods I would love to hear them as I'm sure there must be better methods than that.
I thought the edge of the cake looked a bit bare so I piped some more trees with royal icing to make it look like the winter lifting and the summer returning.

Paintball Cake

The paintball cake gave me another chance to try moulding different coloured fondants together to get a design like camouflage. The first time I tried this technique was for the Mulberry handbag cake which was covered in leopard print fondant and was more difficult to do because of the larger area to cover.

I had fun making the figures as I got to splatter them with yellow and blue fondant to make it look like paint spots. The figures were the only none edible part on the cake as I used a cocktail stick for the paintball guns and put one inside each of the figures to help keep them stable.

The boulders and tree trunk were made with rice crispies and chocolate then covered in grey fondant for the boulders and brown for the tree trunk.

With the cake being for children I wanted to keep the fondant to a minimum, so the top of the cake was covered in green vanilla butter cream which was piped on to give a grass effect. To keep the figures from going mussy from the butter cream I used some of the crumbs from the rice crispies to make it look like the grass had been trodden away.

The trees around the outside of the cake were made with green fondant cut out tree shapes (two for each tree) and then stuck either side of a mint matchstick. To keep them in place I used some of the left over icing.

I was really pleased with the finished cake even with the few minor glitches like the nose falling of the blond haired figure a couple of minutes before it was picked up, thankfully I had some edible glue handy. But other than that it went well.

The Hair Salon Cake

The Hair Salon cake was a gift to a hairdresser who was retiring. The cake is based on her salon, so the wallpaper backdrop is similar to the wallpaper in the salon and the two drier hoods are too. The lady putting curlers in is meant to be the lady who retired and the lady in the chair is a customer. The rest of the objects on the cake are just pieces that are usually found in a salon like a can of hairspray, comb, mirror, hair drier and the obligatory pile of magazines (they were one of my favourite bits).


It was one of the biggest cake challenges I've had so far mainly because of the tiny objects to make and trying to pick the best section of the salon to create. The backdrop was difficult, I needed to find a way to make a sheet that was strong enough to stand up but that could still be edible so I went for a sheet of rice crispies covered in chocolate, which was then cooled over night and covered in fondant the next day. To get the flower effect I have sheets that when rolled over fondant imprint a picture, this gave me the perfect template to paint on using the edible colour dusts. The day before the cake was due to be finished I had a worry on that the wallpaper might fall over and break so I rolled out sheets of sugar paste and let them dry, however they didn't dry in time and thankfully the rice crispies held together.


Most of the items on the cake were edible, the two figures, the chair and the drier hoods (except the seat under them) weren't. The cupboard unit was a section of cake dirty iced and covered in brown fondant and decorated with a pot plant and a pile of magazines. The cake itself was a vanilla sponge with a layer of vanilla icing and then covered in brown fondant which I later put lines running through it to create a wooden floor effect.

I was really pleased with the finished cake as I put a lot of time and effort into making it look like a real salon I heard from the lady who order the cake that everyone loved it and it tasted yummy which is the main thing.

Moshling Cake

Moshlings are the new big thing for children aged 6 to 10 or so I've been told. I personally had never heard of them until I was asked to make a cake in the style of a moshi monster.

The cake was for 7 year old Erin who had requested a moshling cake for her birthday, her favourite character is Poppet who is pink, wears blue trainers and I think is a cat. Originally I was going to design a Hello Kitty cake as I'd been told that that was the in thing for a 7 year old girl but it wasn't much of a change in colour or shape when asked to do Poppet instead.

The cake is a chocolate madeira cake with chocolate chips through the mixture and two layers of chocolate butter cream to keep the cake moist. The bulk of the cake is covered in hot pink fondant and I used baby pink, white and turquoise to create the character. I think the only fiddly bit was getting the fondant smooth over the cut out sections in the sponge but other than that it looked like the picture I was given.