In the Vintage Maps issue of Cake Central Magazine (Volume 6, Issue 5), we asked cakemakers to create wedding cakes inspired by the charm of traveling by sea and train. The soothing beach-y palette on Joann Finlayson's (JoTakestheCake) cake has us wishing for a trip to the seaside. We felt it deserved a second look! Read on to learn about Joann’s design process.

"Vintage is one of my favourite styles. Straight away I knew I wanted to feature the nautical map prominently and I sourced a stencil from Evil Cake Genius. [The] next big feature was the floral anchor, which I took inspiration from a tattoo I found online. I wasn’t sure how I was going to incorporate an octopus into an elegant wedding design though so I knew that would be my challenge. I always love to do a bit of hand painting in my designs, and I found the perfect opportunity to do this on the board and got to include my octopus.

I always do a very simple sketch of my cakes but not in much detail as I am not very good at drawing. I also tend to make use of the free BakingIt.com cake sketcher feature as it allows you to select your cake sizes, tiers, etc so you can visualize it better. 

The final design was pretty much 95% as per plan. I think I changed up the colours of the flowers, but that’s about it. I also changed the top tier design, my initial plan was to hand-paint the octopus at the top but didn’t like that idea while I was working on it. Instead I added more florals combined with some elegant octopus tentacles which I really think completed the design."

"[My favourite thing is] definitely the floral anchor, it came out exactly as I had envisioned. I used the inspiration picture [Cake Central] sent to come up with my initial design. The petals were used on the bottom tier. The rope, the anchor, the octopus, the twine, the colours were all based on elements in the inspiration picture. I loved the inspiration and I love the final design, I would not change anything."

To see more of Joann's work, visit her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoTakestheCake.