In the Navy!!!

It has been far too long since I have blogged any cakes, but for good reason......I've been busy making cakes!! Now that I have the chance to sit down with a nice cup of Barry's, I decided to throw up the last few cake projects I worked on. I'll start with a 30th birthday cake for Irish Naval officer, Conor Foley, who was stationed aboard the L.É. Niamh Naval Ship.

When Conor's now fiance Claire Doyle (I'm pretty sure it was my cake that sealed the deal!!), I was delighted to get the opportunity to stretch my 3-D cake skills (and boy were they tested!).

I started off by making the ocean on the cake board. I had seen a nifty Youtube clip that shows you how to blend a few colours of fondant icing to get the marble effect. Here are the different stages:

Blending to 2 different blues and a white together

 Blend and twist the colours carefully so they just mush together but don't completely blend in.

Water effect coming together

I then placed the fondant on the cake board, with a few ruffles/creases to give that 3-D effect of the boat going through the water. I have to say I was pretty impressed with myself at this point!

Ta Daaaaaaa!!

Resembling a speedboat at this point!!

So next for the ship. I used 2 loaf tin cakes of chocolate sponge and basically carved it out to a ship shape with the pointed front and separate bridge on top. Having looked at several pictures of our Irish Naval Ship, the L.É. Niamh, I was up on what letters and numbers had to go on the side. Not the kind of thing you want to get wrong!!

I covered the whole cake in fondant icing I had dyed to a very light grey. It is tricky to try get the coverage and smooth finish on an angular cake like this. For this reason there may have been a few lumps and bumps, but I do think this give the effect of a well traveled ship through the rough Irish seas!! No? Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it!!

So as you can see from the picture, it started to look a bit like a speedboat but there was still a lot of work to do!

I wanted to get the L.É. Niamh crest in somewhere so I decided it would go well as the 0 for the age 30 and also on the other side of the ship on it's own! I did my best to replicate the crest by hand with icing, and gave it a bit of glitter to make the gold stand out on the crowns. Not my best work, I must admit, but a "good effort" as my teachers use to often say to me.

So next came the resurrection of the ship's mast. Well this was a funny one. I had my friend Claire O'Connor with me when I was doing this and she kindly drew my attention to the mast resembling the cross our lord was put up on!!! Now I must explain this was because I had just a large stick standing vertically, covered in icing, with another stick going horizontally........like a cross. After lots of laughs, and several reenactments of Jesus on the cross from Claire, I got back to making it look more like a ship's mast. Now maybe you people still don't think it looks like a ship's mast, but I do challenge anyone to try construct a stick covered in fondant with another piece of stick covered in fondant going across it that has to balance on top of a ship cake.

To make the gangplank (check out my naval knowledge!) I just took a large block of white icing and ran it from the board up to the ship, securing on to the side of the ship with a cocktail stick. If I was to do this again I would construct a more solid gangplank from solid icing, leave it dry for a day or two, and then attached it. I placed the L.É. Niamh name here as I thought it was the most distinct place for it to be seen. I then placed a small ball of grey icing in the centre of the deck, with a thick licorice stick as the ship's gun. I ran florist wire around the sides to give the full look of ropes surrounding a ship's deck. I did give the customer Claire the full health and safety brief on what was edible and what was not in case you're wondering!

So the end result was this:

It was all packed up in this ginormous box to be delivered. It was actually the birthday boy himself that collected it but he was under strict instructions not to peak at it!!

It's funny looking back on this cake that was done in July 2013, and seeing the different things I would do better now. This is the benefit of taking pictures as I go along, something I've lost the habit of doing lately, is that I get to see all the little bits and pieces that look odd individually but come together to make the final product. I hope you liked this blog, and learned something!!