Pirate Cake

For a swashbuckling adventure, create this simple pirate ship cake. Made from a single sheet cake and a single round cake, this pirate ship is sure to please.  We made this cake for a little boy who was celebrating his fifth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese and we had countless people ask us where we bought it.

Here’s our secret:

1.       Bake a cake (according to package or recipe directions) in a flat pan. We used a white cake in a 13 inch by 9 inch pan.

2.       Bake a cake (according to package or recipe directions) in a round pan. We used a chocolate cake mix in a 9 inch round pan.

3.       Place both cakes in the refrigerator until cold and firm, approximately three hours.

4.       Frost the cake in the flat pan a blue color. We made a standard vanilla and powdered sugar frosting with blue food coloring.

5.       Cut the round cake in half. Frost the flatter side of the cake and stick the two sides together. Carve one end to a point. Blunt the other end. Position the cake on the center of the flat cake.

6.       Frost the outside of the pirate ship with brown or chocolate frosting.

7.       Press four to six candles into unwrapped Rollo candies. Press the ends of the candles through the center of the Rollo candies and into the cake. These are cannons, and are extremely fun to light.

8.       Stack Kit Kat pieces around the top edge of the boat.

9.       Cut three squares of paper and decorate as desired. Use tape or glue to secure them to skewers. Press the skewers into the top of the pirate ship.

10.   Decorate the deck of the ship with gold candies, such as wrapped Rollo and Reese’s Pieces. Add Swedish Fish to the blue frosting if desired.

Serve, eat and enjoy!

Planet Cake

This out-of-this-world birthday cake was created for a space-crazy three year old boy. He was very pleasantly surprised when a pile of gummy worms and Oreo crumbles spilled from the center.

Creating this cake is easy once you know how. Here's how we did it.

1. Make two cakes in round bowls. For our cake, we used one large round metal bowl for each piece. However, it took two cake mixes for each half (for a total of four cake mixes). We used two white and two chocolate. We had to bake our cakes at 250 for two hours and 350 for one half hour to finish them. Be sure to grease the bowl liberally. 
2. Remove the cakes. Flatten the flat side.
3. Cut a hole in the center of each cake, if you want to fill it. We filled ours with gummy worms and Oreo cookie crumbles. Angle a knife toward the center of the cake and cut in a circle to form a hole. Fill it until the filling is level with the surrounding cake.

4. Frost the flat surface of the cake (and filling). Stack the cakes flat-side together, using this frosting layer as glue.
5. Frost the entire outside of the cake. We used green-tinted buttercream frosting.
6. Create the rings by sliding colored Twizzler licorice onto skewers. Insert the skewers at regular intervals around the cake. Connect pipe cleaners into a long rope and weave them between the skewers to finish the rings.