Maelstrom of Doom... and Buttercream!

Yes, it’s okay. You can laugh.

This is my final cake project for Sugar Momma’s class, the "individual cake." And yeah, it’s a bit rough, but I have to say I’m just tickled about it, and Chef had a good laugh when I brought it up to her for critique. [Update: I got my grade in the class overall, an A-, but a 9 out of 10 for this cake... in contrast, the shagadelic blue and white buddy cake Legolas and I did got a mere 8.5 out of 10]

The assignment was to layer, fill and stack three tiers of sponge cake, finish with buttercream and any decorations we wanted that expressed a theme of our choosing. I figured, I’ll have the rest of my career to make fussy flowers and ruffles of white fondant for demanding customers. I’m going to make a cake I’d want to have.

Several classmates asked me if I was going to do a pirate cake. Jeez, I’d hate to be pigeonholed...

Instead, I was inspired by my longtime yearning, always sharper in the summer months, to visit the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. They are amazing geologically, with lots of places to hike, and just offshore in the cold northern Atlantic waters is the original Maelstrom, sometimes called "the Charybdis of the North." Yes, nasty, nasty currents that can warp into actual whirlpools when conditions are right.

Plus, while I like pirates well enough (hello!), I really, really like Vikings. A lot. Besides, as Dr. Virago and I learned on the Isle of Man, "a viking is a pirate until he arrives somewhere he wants to be."

And I figure, if you’re going to do the Maelstrom, not just some rinky-dink whirlpool, but the freakin’ Maelstrom, you can’t go halfway. You’ve got to have a kraken, some sharks, skeletons and doomed vikings. What kind of cake would it be without doomed vikings?

Oh, and it also totally had to be upside down with a big hole in the middle.

Both the Divine Chef M, who saw the start of the project, and Sugar Momma, who returned from the World Pastry Conference for the last two days of class, gave me this look like "well, this will be interesting" when I showed them the sketches we had to do in advance.

Here’s a shot where you can better see the depth of the maelstrom, which extended about halfway down into the cake. You can also see one of the things I was really, really happy with: the texture on the skin of my giant evil purple octopus. Chef’s first comment when I brought the cake up for critique was "I thought it was supposed to be a giant squid."

"It’s still a cephalopod, Chef," I replied. (The giant squid proved too difficult to model in the humid weather.)

She gave me a long look and smiled slightly. "Ah. Cephalopod. That’s a good word."

The decorations themselves were not difficult; aside from the buttercream, it’s all modeling chocolate. The two big challenges were the engineering aspect of balancing the cake stack and ridiculous humidity. I had a really nice spiral on the prow of the boat, for example, but it collapsed, so I wound up ripping it off and squishing what was left into a vague horsehead shape.

The bottom tier is a 6" four layer sponge cake. The middle is an 8" four layer sponge cake with the top cut off at about a 20 degree angle, with a small well for the bottom of the whirlpool. The top tier is, again, a four layer sponge, this time 10" across, cut off at about a 30 degree angle with the center entirely cut out.

I was very happy with my modeling chocolate decorations until it came time to apply them. Usually, modeling chocolate is like Plasticine as you work with it, but then hardens to Tootsie Roll-like consistency. Not rock hard, but fairly stable. Well, Friday being the day before summer break, they’d turned off the air conditioning and it was a nasty humid summer day, so everyone’s things were melting. Poor Legolas' calla lillies were literally wilting and sliding down the sides of his cake until we propped them up with toothpicks.

My thin modeling chocolate pieces, like my great white sharks (one of which is visible in the top photo), viking shields and sail, felt like soaking wet paper towels and drooped and tore at the slightest tension. The thicker pieces, notably the longboat and mast, were mushy and couldn’t support any weight. I tried in vain to get the mast to support the sail, but it was too humid and our 10:15 finish time was about two minutes away, so I doomed the doomed vikings a little more and cut halfway through the mast, then cut a gaping hole in the sail and let it all droop down as if the ship was already sinking.

Above is a close-up of what everyone agreed was their favorite bit: the drowning viking. Chef's comment on that was that she loved it, but even more, "I love that his shipmates aren't even trying to save him. They're not even looking at him. They're just sort of going 'onward!'"

Can you tell she has little kids at home or what?

My friend Daria looked at the drowning viking for a long time, finally shook her head and said "You just had to take it to the next level, didn't you?"

If I’d had more time, I would have mended my hammerhead shark (its head ripped off when I tried to lift its soggy, humidity-soaked body off the foil where it was laying), I would have smoothed out the buttercream sides better and gotten that damn mast upright and supporting the sail, but I had a lot of fun doing this one.

Knowing it wouldn’t survive the drive home, nevermind the 800-mile drive I’ll be making this weekend to spend some time visiting my friend L in Georgia, I gave the cake to one of the women who works in the hospitality office who has a big family with a lot of kids. Remarkably, the cake survived being carried halfway across campus in one piece.

Oh and yes, in case you’re wondering, I did in fact have the only cake with a drowning viking. Or a cephalopod. Or upside down. Here’s a shot of some of my classmates’ cakes awaiting critique:

That's Legolas' cake in the middle (go Team Color Fiend!), Mandilicious' tea party cake on the left and Daria's always perfect, always dainty butterfly cake on the right.