The crawfish boil pot cake is probably one of my favorites. It combines two of my favorite things, chocolate and CRAWFISH! Growing up in the south, Louisiana that is, crawfish is a way of life. We start learning how to eat these mudbugs at a very early stage of life because our parents just get tired of peeling them for us. If you’ve ever had some well-seasoned boiled crawfish you’ll understand why. I believe it’s more about the juice captured on the inside of the head and paws that make these things even that more delicious. I digress.

Every year my dear friend throws her annual crawfish boil which is typically the day after Good Friday (the Friday before Easter Sunday and the last Friday Catholics are required to only eat seafood). The first time she put together this event I was just exploring cakes for fun. I volunteered to supply the cake. I had this idea of a cake that looked like an actual crawfish boil; crawfish boil pot cake. The crawfish were to look exactly like actual crawfish but in chocolate form.

I bought 5 pounds of boiled crawfish, ate all but 3 and made molds out of them. This was very hard to do; not the mold process but parting ways with 3 very delicious, big crawfishes. The mold came out perfect for what I was trying to attempt. BUT after getting the perfect chocolate crawfish I had a heck of a time getting a good coat of edible painting on these things. I was using the Wilton gel food colorings and the coating kept beading on the surface. I read up a little about it and asked some of my cake friends how to make it stick to chocolate. They suggested adding cornstarch. This helped but it wasn’t perfect and I was only able to get 2 good crawfish.

I had spent so much time trying to paint these darn things that I didn’t have time to make the boiling pot so I ended up with a chocolate cake with chocolate icing which looks more like a crawfish mud hole and added the crawfish, a fondant potato, and corn on top. I made the cake board out of personalized newspaper and put the other crawfish on the board with another fondant corn. It was cute but not quite what I was going for.

Fast forward to last year. It was my mom and grandmother’s birthday. I had no clue what to get them. For most celebrations, when crawfish are in season, we celebrate big events with a big crawfish boil. Since it wasn’t crawfish season, and I couldn’t throw them a crawfish boil, I decided to make them a cake that resembled a crawfish boil. The difference from this time and the first attempt for a crawfish boil cake was that I finally found a paint that actually paints on chocolate and the coating actually sticks to the surface….no beading.

And this happened…

 

YES, beautiful chocolate crawfish. The mold worked out amazingly and captured all details of an actual crawfish. All I had to do was add the eyes and whiskers. Beautiful right?

 

 

This cake turned out better than I imagined. Look at the customized newspaper board. I believe mom and maw maw (grandmother in Creole) loved that part the most….It now hangs up in the living room :). One of the best crawfish boil pot cakes I’ve seen.

 

Now back to the annual crawfish boil event my friend Latoya throws every year.  I am now more confident in my abilities to do some amazing things with cake and she is always open to let me freely create so I came up with a different version of the crawfish boil pot cake….

 

If you’ve ever seen one of those clever Chic-Fil-A signs with the cows who are always telling you to eat more chicken you’ll understand why this is so funny and clever.