The Soldier Returns

Sometimes I long to be landlocked, and to work in a bakery…..


So this year, I wanted to make a Threadcake, I wanted a fancy cake for my birthday, and I’ve wanted to make a Decemberists cake for a long time now, so I decided to do the whole three birds, one stone thing.

The cake itself is a Devil’s Food/Guinness Stout cake, frosted with homemade Baileys Irish Cream Buttercream (which was insanely awesome, by the way). I covered two layers in white vanilla fondant, and one layer in chocolate fondant.

I’ve been waiting on a reprint of this design for at least the last year, since I missed out on it the first time around (boo.). But at least I got to work with it anyway! The three layers of the cake are colored the way they are to represent the colors in the design of the shirt, as well as the two different colors that the shirt was printed on. I wanted the bottom layer to look more like water than just a plain blue dyed fondant would, so I covered the cake in white fondant and used a can of blue food coloring to airbrush it and make it look a little more wavy.

When I first decided to make this cake, the two characters on the shirt made me think of a wedding cake, and that’s why I decided to make them the “topper”, and incorporate the rest of the t-shirt design in other places on a three-tier cake. Since the shirt was inspired by the Decemberists’ song “The Island: Come and See/The Landlord’s Daughter/You’ll Not Feel the Drowning,” I made each tier’s theme represent a different section/story from the song, and drew on a lyric for each. (They say: “We’ll not go home again..”, “She cursed, she shivered..”, “You’ll not feel the drowning..”), while still sticking with the elements and objects in the original shirt design (i.e. the banner, the vines, etc).

I baked, covered with fondant, and decorated on different days, so I worked on this cake off and on for quite a lot of hours, but it was fun. And it tasted great too.