A Settler's Birthday!

I changed my mind on the design of this cake a couple of days beforehand, sometimes ideas come and go, suggestions are made and I still feel uninspired. This one clicked into place for me and I knew that I wanted to do it, even after a busy month of cakes, it still seemed like a fun idea.

There may be many of you who have never heard of the board game Settlers of Catan, but the recipient of this Birthday cake is a big fan of it. For reference - this is what it looks like:

The idea was to combine this with a cake - easy, right? My very first hiccup on this project was during the planning process, it suddenly became very clear that I had forgotten how to draw a hexagon (in my defence I have not needed to draw a hexagon since school, which was 12 years ago), thank goodness for the internet!

I made two victoria sponges, once they were completely cool, I iced the middle and prepared to start decorating!

I started with covering the cake in butter icing that I had coloured blue, I covered it once and made the butter icing a slightly darker blue and iced again around the bottom of the cake. I wanted to give it a choppy sea effect

Happy with the butter icing, I popped it in the fridge to set a little, whilst I carried on with the royal icing. Firstly, I needed to make a template, this is where I got a little stuck, so after much internet search and measuring, etc, I had my template. I decided to make 2 sheep hexagons, 1 quarry, 1 brick, 1 wood, 1 wheat and every board has a desert, so I could not miss that out. I had to colour icing in 6 different colours and cut out the hexagons. 

All cut out, they were ready to go on the cake. the next step was to make them look like the hexagons from the game, as the game is fairly detailed, I used the colours I had and hand painted the detail on.

To make it look like more of a game board (like the above picture), I piped around the edges in a light yellow water icing, creating extra little yellow patches in every other corner for ports.

Part of the game involves using counters on each hexagon, I made them next out of a light yellow royal icing and used the black edible pen to write the numbers, then placed them in the middle of the hexagons. Using the same colour, I made the sails for the ships in the ports too, used small amounts of coloured royal icing to make the little icons and again used the edible black pen to write the numbers. Once they were in place, I made the ships themselves out of brown icing and added them to the cake. 

The only things left were the 3D details. I made the Theif out of royal icing and placed him on the desert hexagon - which is where he starts in the game.

I then made 3 houses (or settlements) one white, one blue and one red and placed them in potential starting positions with the rectangle pieces that illustrate roads in the game.I then made a quick scroll out of some left over light yellow icing and some left over brown icing and rolled up each edge, then wrote a Happy Birthday message. I also added some white water icing to the sides of the cake to portray waves, but they are difficult to see from the pictures. Then finally it was done.

Really pleased with the outcome, I worried overnight that the colours that were painted on would run, but they stayed put and I think the effect was really great and it was such fun to make!

Total Time Spent: 4.5 Hours
Useful Tips Gained: You make a hexagon using a circle
Items to Purchase: More paintbrushes
Items Added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous Items Wished For: More colours