You'll want to go into battle for the best slice of this HMAS Vampire in cake form!
Simple, full of shortcuts, and all about stacking and frosting and licking of bowls this battleship cake is easy to involve little ones in most of the making.
Suitable for ages: 3 years and up
Time required: 45 mins
Difficulty: 3 out of 5
Related Exhibitions: HMAS Vampire / Action Stations
This crafty cake-making is not so much about mastering any kind of culinary skill. It’s more a template to recreate the impossible shape of a ship in delicious cake form.
What You'll Need:
- 3 packets of pre-made slab sponge cakes (we used the small square sort available from supermarkets or you can find larger versions at party supply shops)
- 1 batch of buttercream frosting (see our favourite recipe here)
- Blue and black food colouring
- White and black writing icing
- Lollies to decorate (we chose licorice)
- Icing piping bag
- Spatula or butter knife
- Spoons
- Copies of our templates printed on A4: page 1, page 2
- 12 wooden skewers or toothpicks
To Make:
Step 1.
Place the templates onto your sponge cakes and cut out the shapes using a knife. For the first layer we stacked two layers of cake and sculpted the edges on an angle to make our cake more ship-like in shape.
Step 2.
Stack the sponges starting with the base layer, then the second, third and fourth, adding a small amount of frosting between each layer to keep them in place.
Step 3.
Mix up your buttercream colour — we are imitating the battleship grey/blue of our HMAS Vampire by adding 2 small drops of black and 3 small drops of blue to each batch we mix (1/3 of the icing mixture at a time). Once mixed, thoroughly apply all over the ship cake.
Step 4.
Smooth out your icing with a spatula or plastic butter knife.
Once you've covered most of the cake with icing we recommend placing the cake in a freezer for 15 minutes to allow the gooey frosting to set a bit before adding your final batch of frosting.
Step 5.
Remove cake from freezer.
Now it’s time for the fine details. We’re decorating our cake with the number and insignia of HMAS Vampire using white and black writing icing.
Then pipe along the edges of the cake blocks to outline the whole ship for effect. The magic of this white piping is that it will make even a novice icing job look much more presentable.
Add your lolly decorations — licorice for the guns, smarties for the radar towers, whatever takes your fancy. And if all else fails (as our lolly radar did: too heavy to stand up) you can substitute a bit of paper craft on a toothpick.
There it is! A delicious destroyer or a buttercream battleship cake (lets just says it’s a big navy ship).
We’d love to see your creations!
Please send us photos either by email to: web@sea.museum or tag us on Instagram - just tag the photo with our username @sea.museum
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