Crawfish Pirogue Cake with Cookie Crawfish, Corn, Potatoes, and Fixings

My family has a lot of crawfish boils, and one of the best ways to serve the steaming hot crawfish and fixings is in a miniature pirogue serving boat.  I tried to match that "look" in cake and cookies.  Sadly the shape of the boat wasn't quite right, it needed to be shorter in height and longer in length, but everyone at the party got the idea.

The crawfish, corn, potatoes, sausage, lemon, mushrooms, and garlic are cookies.  Some are regular sugar cookies and some are Earl Gray Tea infused shortbread with orange flavored glaze.  Yum.  I like the shortbread ones the best.

First step in this cake adventure was to make some cookie cutters based on actual pictures of the crawfish.  I outlined three different shapes. 

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Then I loaded them into the CookieCad.com app to generate the cookies cutter STL files.  The STL files were converted to GCODE files which I printed on my Creality Ender 3 V2 3D printer.  I just LOVE my 3D printer; I use it on almost every cake.  You can read more about the process in my blog post HERE.

Here are the cookies getting iced.  I use glaze instead of Royal Icing because I hate the taste of Royal Icing.  Glaze is just Powdered Sugar, Corn Syrup, and Milk that you stir together with a spatula.   It is super easy to make.  For the crawfish I used two shades of red and black for the eye.

The corn was fun to make.  I used four different colors to make the little blobs of icing that kind-of sort-of look like kernels of corn.  It was super easy but a little time consuming.

With the cookies all finished and dry, I started on the cake.  First I cut some cake boards to fit the shape of my cake, and then I used the cardboard as a guide to carve the cake.  

Next I crumb coated the cake...

And then I started adding planks of fondant "wood" to the side of the cake.  The fondant is just a hodge-podge of other tinted fondant I had leftover from other cakes.  It is a marbled mixture of brown, beige, green and yellow.  I rolled out the marbled fondant, textured it with a wood-grained texture mat, and then cut it into strips.  Then it was just a matter of sticking the fondant planks onto the cake.

I placed the cake onto the prepared cake drum, and then I added some extra pieces of fondant to the front and back of the pirogue to make bow and stern.

Once the pirogue was in place and secured with a wooden dowel, I arranged the cookies on top and around the base of the cake.

So here is the finished cake again.  Like I mentioned earlier, the proportions of the pirogue isn't correct.  Given the height, it should have been much longer, but I only had to feed 10 people with the cake so I didn't want to make it huge.

And here are the cookies.  Love me some crawfish...

Lets EAT!

Happy Decorating,

Carol