fun cakes

so i was asked by a friend to make some fun cakes for her husbands going away/birthday party. she had the ideas of what she wanted and i helped to make it happen. her requests were she wanted a kayak cake and a snorkeling cake. he loves to snorkel and then there is a pretty funny/mean joke behind the kayak cake. (her husband, who wouldnt wear a life jacket, was out kayaking with a friend when his started sinking. the whole thing ended up under water and his friend had to go get the life guards to come help him pull it out of the water....he was holding just the top handle and the rest was fully under the water sinking) so she thought it would be pretty funny. he did too once he saw the cake :)





so for the kayak cake we had played around with a few ideas. we made a man out of fondant and got the arms and head on him, but he had a funny look to him....could have been the hair and eyes i tried to draw on him....or the nose that we made him :) i had found a few boats at a store and took one of them apart so that we could use just the bottom and then i flipped it upside down and wrote stuff on the sides so that it would be obvious that the boat was sinking. we then tried to put the man on, but he was pretty top heavy and since he was fondant i didnt want leave him on the cake, because he would have to go back into the fridge over night. i had also gotten another boat to use as the life guard rescue boat, so that was on top too. the next morning as i was putting on the finishing touches, josh decided to play around with the ken doll that we were going to try and use for the other cake. kens torso was too big, but josh had the idea of sawing his arms and just using those....and then we popped his head off and it worked out great! thats one of the reasons i keep him around :) i then put a little more icing around his arms and head to make it look like waves and that cake was finished.








the second cake, which also had a strawberry filing, was the snorkeling cake. we were originally going to use the ken doll for this cake, but he was too big and they dont make boy polly pockets. so we ended up making a little man out of fondant and then also making a mask strap and snorkel. i then later added swim trunks to him :) my friend tonya had a sea creature sucker mold and wanted to learn how to play with them, so i was able to show her how to play with those and we used the suckers on the cake. we made some sharks, some turtles, and i also had a mold for dolphins. i really liked the way this cake turned out, and pretty much everything was edible. the strawberry filling gave me a bit of a hassle though. i had never made one before and all of the recipes that i found were more for angle food cakes so i made a strawberry type jam and then added coolwhip...it turned out great, but then my only problem was that i put too much on, so it kept oozing out the side of the cakes :) it was able to block most of it in with some pretty thick icing and what i couldnt i just made to look like waves.

those were some fun cakes to make and i love having a reason to try and play with new things. now if only someone needed another cake with strawberry filling.....