How to Carve a Pirate Ship Cake

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Are ya’ll tired of my half-way tutorials yet? I hope not.

First and foremost, I’m a cake decorator with a real life business. So often, my “tutorials” are a result of a real cake for a real customer – not a carefully laid out plan to “do a tutorial”.

That means that I try my best to take pictures of every step, or at least the relevant ones, so I can share them with you. But more realistically, I end up a slave to the clock and the steps near the end are often not photographed because I’m trying to finish the cakes and get them to my customers in time for their parties.

In some ways, I’m sorry about that – sad that I can’t give you the best tutorials on the web. But in other ways, I’m doing what’s best for my customers and right now, that has to be my priority. Is that wrong? If I could do it all, I would, but I’m pretty sure that would involve a cape and super powers and a few extra hours in every day.

With all of that in mind – here are some pics for How to Carve a Pirate Ship Cake.

For this cake, I baked three (3) 11 x 7 x 2 cakes.

I laid one down on my covered cake board, then used stiff buttercream to draw out the shape of the ship.

I filled in the outline with vanilla buttercream and smoothed it out.

Stack on cake #2 and repeat with stiff frosting, then fill in with buttercream.

Stack on cake #3, but the outline on the top is a little different. Plus, you’ll be scraping this off eventually – I just pipe it on to use as a guide.

Using the frosting lines as a guide, carve off the front corners of the ship – and also carve out a section near the back. Be sure to save that rectangle chunk of cake.

You can see where I also carved inward around the bottom to taper the ship down a bit. And I eventually carved the front end to be a little smoother.

**At this point, I removed the stiff frosting lines from the top of the cake.

Take that small rectangle chunk of cake and double it up on the back of the cake. I used a thin layer of buttercream there to help it stick.

Since the back end was a little wobbly, being so tall and skinny, I used two bamboo skewers as dowels to give it stability. After taking this picture, I cut them off level with the cake. I also used a larger dowel in the front end of the cake (not pictured).

**Important step: at this point, I highly recommend freezing the cake, or at least refrigerating it overnight to firm it up. If you try to spread buttercream on all of those exposed ‘carved’ areas, it’s likely to tear the cake!! But frozen cake is much easier to spread frosting over!

After I froze the cake for a few hours, I covered the whole thing in a thin layer of buttercream!

From here, I began the fondant decorations. I didn’t take pictures of all of those steps, but I did give some details in my original post about the Jake and the Neverland Pirates Pirate Ship Cake. Here are the only two pics I have: