Fishing Cake

Here it is!

I hope it lives up to the hype at least a little bit...

I have had the pleasure of getting to know my friend Connie through Bible Study over the past several years. She is wonderful! Her husband was celebrating a birthday a couple of weeks ago and Connie asked me to make a cake for him with a fishing theme. I was thrilled to be able to do it! And I'm not just saying that! Connie let me run with a design, which was also a lot of fun.

A closer view of the top:

I have to admit, there were a few things I wasn't quite sure about before I started this cake. I had the design in mind and loved it. Originally, it was going to just be the boat. But the more I thought about adding a person sleeping, the more I liked the idea. I decided to go for it, even though I've never molded a person before. Ever. I was really pleased with how it all came together!

The moral of this story is....

Just go for it! The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, it gets removed, lessons will be learned. You learn what doesn't work, what might work, and how to improvise in the midst of it all. I truly believe that I learn more and improve more from my failures than from successes. Though the successes are a lot more fun! :)

Okay, back to the cake!

The boat is cut from fondant with a little tylose powder mixed in to help it dry more quickly. I made a little model out of plain paper first so that I could make sure it would fit together properly. I used the paper pieces as templates to cut the fondant shapes. There were four pieces total: one for each side, a bottom, and a back. I made the pieces look more like wood by scoring "planks" with a knife tool. I then made more shallow line marks randomly across the "boards." I dusted the whole thing with a little black powder color to give it more dimension. Then I "glued" the pieces together with some vodka and supported it with paper towels and little plastic cups until it dried. If I did this again, I would glue the pieces together with melted chocolate and I'd try to finish the edges of the boat a little better.

Do you like the little fish?

He's a trout. Not too shabby, huh? I really love this little guy. He is molded from white gumpaste and then colored with petal dust. For the color, I mixed together two different greens and a little black, then dusted it on to the fish with a tiny little paint brush (used only for cake stuff and never for paint). Pink petal dust colored his mouth.

I wanted to make my fish as real and accurate looking as possible, so I printed off several pictures of trout from the web and tried to mimic the details as best I could. I actually made eleven of these little guys. All but the one above were used as cupcake toppers on gluten-free cupcakes made by Connie's daughter-in-law.

I also love the little cattails. They are toothpicks painted with brown food coloring and topped with a little brown fondant. All the other details on the cake are fondant, except for the grass, which is green buttercream piped on using a grass piping tip.

The cake itself was vanilla bean filled with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. It is also covered with the vanilla buttercream. The water on the top was fun to do and so easy - just swirl away with an offset spatula!

I hope you all like my fishing cake! Thanks for stopping by!