Sailboat Cake

Here's a picture of a surprise birthday cake I made this weekend for my friend's boyfriend on his big "30" birthday! He loves to sail and has a "finn" sailboat so she asked me if I would create a sailboat cake for him! I had never heard of this type of boat before so she sent me some website links as well as a picture of his boat...they are tiny, made only for 1 person to fit, I had never heard of this type of boat before. I told her I would love to give this sailboat cake a try but wasn't too confident in my sculpting skills to create the actual sailboat shape! All week long I went back and forth on how I was going to create the sailboat...should I try to sculpt it, make it out of royal icing and place it ontop of the cake, or just use fondant to create the shape...well as you can see from the picture above, fondant turned out to be the route I took.

Well actually I did trace the shape of the boat in royal icing first, but when I went to pick it up, the icing hadn't quite dried all the way and the boat cracked in about 4 pieces. Plan A...destroyed, it was back to the drawing board. I am fairly new to using royal icing and according to my Wilton cake class teacher she says whenever you make pieces out of royal icing you should always make at least 2 or 3 because there is a chance they could crack...ooops...I only made 1 boat since it was a rather large shape and what's my luck...it cracked! Honestly though, I like the look of the fondant boat better, the lines look much cleaner.

I used white fondant and tinted it with some blue coloring to create a sort of swirled effect to resemble water.

Around the edge of the cake I created wave shapes and then piped white royal icing around the edges to give it the look of the white tops you see in the ocean when the waves form. (This was my husband's idea...pretty creative huh!...he also created the shape of the wave as a template for me too so I could create the fondant pieces...he's better at drawing than I am!)

Here's a picture of Derek, the birthday boy and his sweet girlfriend Katie who arranged for this secret cake for him!