Where did my infant go?

Castaway Cake

When I was little my dad gave me the nick name "Skipper Two" because of my love of "Gilligan's Island," namely (you guessed it) because of my love of Alan Hale Jr.'s character. It has been years since I've watched an episode, but several months ago TV Land and MeTV both started airing it. Just watching the first episode made me fall in love with it all over again! What pleased me more was that my five-year-old has fallen in love with it too, and we have been known the check out the videos from the library so we can have it on a constant loop!

Before having a child I never really put much thought into what I was watching on television. Of course, over the years there was no need to worry especially when we had shows like "Little House on the Prairie," "The Waltons," "Highway to Heaven," etc. But now I am very hard pressed to be able to turn the television on and not worry about what my child is going to be exposed to. In fact, our viewing habits are very different now because it has brought my husband and I greater awareness as to what we allow to "entertain" us...but back to Gilligan.

"Gilligan's Island" is just pure clean fun! I don't have to worry about what she will see, what she will hear, or what she repeats! And the characters are all so darn lovable.

Since I made a less than successful attempt at a guitar cake for my husband's birthday, I decided that I really needed more practice and would just start small and get a feel for construction and how to work with frostings and buttercreams instead of fondant. I spent a night poking around Pinterest and the web looking for inspiration and discovered Gilligan's Island is sorely underrepresented in the cake world.

I want to change that.

So using a box mix and pre-made frosting my daughter and I set out to make some cake art that would make the castaways proud. At least we hope it...

My pipping work with the leaf tip could use a bit of work...and I need practice on size, scale, etc. Maybe one day I'll have a good quality SLR digital to capture these "sweet" moments without the coloring being off in the photo.

 I am my own worst critic, I assure you...

My daughter did the fish (Pillsbury Aqua Blue Funfetti comes with the fish) and she carefully placed the graham cracker "sand." I mixed white frosting with the blue to get the sky color, and green food coloring with more of the white for the hut. The black icing was from a Wilton pre-packaged tube that was left over from the guitar cake (mixing colors to get black icing will cause you to lose your mind).

So, one Gilligan Cake down, with more to come.