Vegan Pirate Ship Cake

Brave little ship about to hit cupcake island.

Intros and Inspirations

This cake was made using my yellow cake recipe. It's moist as a wet hankie and completely delicious. However, the setting, an 18^th century pirate ship? Completely new. I decided to make the ship-themed cake for Rob's birthday after my good friend Bonnie mentioned her employer making a ship cake. Rob also is a huge fan of pirate ships. My model is loosely based on this:

Very loosely.

History of Dish

Pirate ship cakes have been around a long time. Possibly even longer than pirates.

Rob asked, 'Where did you get that plastic pirate?!' To his surprise, the pirate figurine bedecking the cake was carefully researched and based on Jean Lafitte.

Or, it has been sitting on our dining room window sill for the last 3 years (apparently, unnoticed).

Materials Needed

• Yellow Cake recipe & frosting
• Blue food coloring
• Rum extract
• Wooden skewers
• Fake flags. I used old CD labels bent over.
• Optional: decorative icing. I used black glitter style. Bad choice in this case (see conclusion).
  
• Authentic Pirate Figurine©
• Blue sparkly sprinkles
• Corn holder and candle cannons
• Serving platter

Yield and Pre-heat

Since the round cake pans will cook faster than the big rectangle version, you will need to cook them for a shorter period. Ditto for the mini-cupcake islands.

Mixing/Blending

• Make two batches of the Yellow Cake recipe.
• Place the batter evenly into four pans: a rectangular pan, two round pans, and four small cupcake tins. (I only used one cupcake for this version.)
  

Baking and Frosting Making

• Monitor the baking process. The mini-cupcake islands come out first, followed by the round cake ship hulls. The cake is ready when a finger-press indentation bounces back in the middle (thanks Rob's cousin Melissa).

• Meanwhile, make the frosting. Based on 'yo ho ho and a bottle of rum' I decided that it would be necessary to make the sea rum-flavored. I added blue food coloring and some rum extract to one batch of the frosting. The frosting was a simple mix of 3/4 Spectrum non-hydrogenated shortening + 1/4 earth balance spread, organic powdered sugar, and rum extract. (I used imitation since it wasn't a real pirate ship)

• For the actual ship, I made chocolate frosting using the same recipe, except eliminated the rum and added about 2 T of rich chocolate cocoa powder.
• Place both frostings in the fridge to chill.

Assembling

• Let the cakes cool. Once cool, remove from pans carefully (I put pans upside down over plate/platter then tap the pan).
• Cut out two rectangular chunks from the middle of your rectangle cake (see picture below). Your ships will be sailing there later. Retain the cutouts as you will need to supplement the ship with part of them and/or you can eat them later.
• Cut the round cakes in half. The four halves will eventually become your ship. So they balance better, you can also trim off the round parts, just barely. Though I don't think that was necessary in hindsight.
• Place chocolate frosting between two slices, to glue them together. Do the same with the other two.
• Coat the outside of the cakes with a thin layer of appropriate frosting color and cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours (I was in a hurry and put them in the freezer). This will ensure your later layers of frosting will adhere better and crumbs will not get in your frosting (thanks for the tip, Shirle). You need only coat those areas you are going to frost (that will show) and any damage areas (where the ship-cake was hit by cannon balls and is coming apart).
• Once cooled, frost your rectangle sea first. Sprinkle with blue sparkles.

• Rather than do what I did, frost the boats first then place them into the sea.

• Add your cupcake island(s) and skewered flags and pirate. Add the corn holder and candle cannons. Don't forget Jean Lafitte.
  

Eating

Some people preferred the sea whereas others took the chocolate ship.

Photo by James

Thankfully, no one ate or wanted the plastic pirate or corn holders. But everything else was pretty much disapeared.

Optional:

Blueberry cannon balls and vegan wafer walk-the-plank planks.

Conclusion

Though I noticed an unfortunate likeness to a certain oil spill after decorating the ship with a “B” and placing little black frosting drops in the 'sea', little room for comment remained after being distracted by my dead-on skull and crossbones flags that were viciously rumored to be potato heads.

Yellow Cake

Today Hortamatic is taking on CAKE. How to veganize it properly?

Arguably, vegan bakery has greatly improved over the last five years. One of the challenges I initially experienced, however, was locating a piece of cake that did not crumble in dry bits upon meeting my fork.

The other challenge was finding a good vegan yellow cake recipe. It seemed that both bakeries and individuals had contracts with the cocoa growers to exclusively manufacture chocolate cake. I love chocolate as much as the next vegan, but give me a little yellow cake love, please.

A few years ago, while searching for Vasilopita recipes for a New Year’s party, I accidentally stumbled upon a cake recipe that required about 14 eggs. Not one to give up easily, I decided to take it on, Vegomagic-style. The resulting recipe can be adapted in various ways noted below so that you can eat more of it by celebrating virtually everything (holidays, birthdays, Thursdays, etc.).

The cake is moist, sweet, and undetectably vegan.

Enjoy!

HortaMatic Yellow Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 cup earth balance or other vegan margarine
• 2 cups white sugar
• 3 cups all purpose white flour
• 1 cup warm soymilk
• 1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• ½ t salt
• Fluffy stuff #1: 3 t baking powder, 1.5 t baking soda, 1/4 cup + 2 T flour, 1/2 cup + 4 T water
• Fluffy stuff #2: 1/2 cup soy vanilla yogurt OR 1/2 cup orange juice; 1/4 cup coconut milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 10 inch round cake pan.

Mixing:

• In a large bowl, cream the earth balance & sugar with a beater.
• Stir in the flour & salt and mix until the mixture is mealy.
• In a separate bowl, whisk the fluffy stuff #1 ingredients together until fluffy. The mixture will foam up like a rabid egg. Slowly mix this into the margarine/sugar mix.
• Mix together then add the fluffy stuff #2 to the margarine/sugar mix.
• Warm the soymilk, add the lemon to it, then fold this into the margarine/sugar mix.

Baking:

Pour the mixture into the greased pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes. Cool on the rack for 10 minutes before putting onto a plate.

Dressin’ ‘Er Up

Frost when cool. Optional: put a mixture in the middle of two cakes, such as Tofutti cream cheese and strawberries. Or a coconut cream mixture.

Frost with:

• 3 sticks of Earth Balance shortening & spread (2 sticks shortening to 1 stick spread is nice)
• 1 bag or box of confectioners’ sugar
• 1 t vanilla OR ½ t almond extract and 2 T cocoa powder
• 1-2 T of Coconut Milk fat (for added fluffyness)

Variations:

• For a White Russian style cake, 1/2 replace the OJ or soy yogurt with Kaluha. Add 1 T vodka to t frosting.
• For cupcake minis (see picture below) decrease baking time to 18 minutes.
• To make chocolate minis, add 2 T cocoa powder to the mix.