warships

One of the boy's new passions is warships. He recently impressed several of his uncles with his knowledge of things associated with the sinking of the Bismarck (he watches the movie on youtube). So in addition to visiting or otherwise viewing warships whenever possible

warships viewed from a tour of Portsmouth Harbour, England

for his birthday he wanted a warship cake for his birthday party.

Being that I am not so enamoured of warships, this did present a bit of a challenge for me. Youtube did not have any videos of warship cakes to help me out but I did find a template for a pirate ship in my Kids Birthday Cake book which gave me a starting point. I baked a chocolate cake using a recipe from another Children's Baking Book in a 9x13 pan. From there I cut a 4" piece from the bottom of the cake and then cut the remaining piece in half lengthwise.

I stacked the two lengthwise pieces and cut triangles off the front to form the bow. Using a biscuit cutter I cut two circles for the big front and rear turrets and a long rectangle and a smaller one to form the bridge and tower section for the midship. I was all set to go with that configuration and had "glued" the pieces in place using some leftover frosting (from these). The boy came in to see the progress on "his" ship and wanted 4 smaller gun turrets added around the bridge so I added small squares around the bridge structure and secured those to the cake with toothpicks.

 I placed the cake in the fridge to firm up and made some frosting and then added some black gel food colouring to try and get the grey warship colour. I consulted the experts (husband and boy) several times before starting the crumb coat. I had trouble getting the frosting to stick to the cake (it was too thick) and realized after I'd done the first coat, it would have been easier to frost the turrets and tower separately from the cake and add them on afterwards. Oh well.

the boy used leftover cake to make his own ship!

 I thinned out the frosting and added two more coats to get it somewhat smooth

then added some windows using black icing gel, water around the base of the ship and sparklers in the tower and main turrets (7 for the boy's birthday) and the boy and his Dad added toothpicks in the small turrets so it looked as though the ship had all it's guns.

The cake was a big hit with the birthday boy and went well with the Star Wars cake of his best pal at the party (it was a joint birthday party).

 With the sparklers lit, it looked as though the guns were firing, which the boys thought was cool.