Pirate Ship Cake

This pirate ship cake is made from two round sponge cakes. I used a 10" round cake pan, but you could adjust the amounts to make a larger or smaller cake. 

The cake was made for my son's 3rd birthday. He had a joint party with his cousin, also 3. The cake is designed so that the spare pieces from the Pirate Ship Cake can be used to make a Pirate Island Cake. If you don't want to make the Pirate Island Cake as well then I recommend that you freeze the extra cake for later use. 

First you're going to bake two round sponge cakes. You want the cakes to be pretty solid so choose a recipe that will give you fairly solid cakes. 

For each cake I used this 4 egg sponge cake recipe. I used the whole recipe in one 10" round cake pan and baked until a skewer inserted in the center came out clean (around 30 mins). Make sure the cakes are well cooked - you want them nice and solid. 

So for the Pirate Ship Cake and Pirate Island Cake I used 8 eggs in total. 

You want the cakes to be as flat as possible. I used the trick of spinning the cake pans so that there's more mixture at the edge of the pan than the center. It worked well. But don't worry too much, you can always slice the top off a domed cake. 

Once the cakes have cooled, refrigerate them for at least a couple of hours - I left them overnight. This makes the cakes nice and solid to work with when you need to cut them. 

You can either print and scale the cake templates, or you can just use them as a guide. The key is to make sure that you have sufficient cake to make the triangle for the bottom layer of the cake. 

Now cut the first round cake as shown in Template 1. You are making the bottom layer of the ship and placing it onto the cake board as in the picture above. 

Add some jelly to the end of the large piece that comes from the center of the cake - where the red line is on the template. Stick the triangular piece on, joining up the red lines. 

You now have the base of the ship.