I made a goal this year that I wouldn't purchase any store bought cakes for special occasions this year. I wanted to make all the cakes. I'm not talking about tossing a can of frosting on top of the cake, I'm talking about some serious decorating for these cakes! With Katelyn's birthday came my opportunity to my skills (or lack thereof) to the test!
Katelyn had a water party with all of her friends, so I wanted to come up with a design that went along with the party theme. An ocean cake with fishies is what I came up with...
My writing skills leave something to be desired, but I think I pulled off a decent cake for my first shot!
I was able to get the blue ocean color by using Wilton icing color. It's a more concentrated product than your standard food coloring, which is watered down.
The sand on the bottom of the ocean is crushed graham crackers. If you want to take the sand a step further, you can add edible glitter to the graham crackers, to make the sand glisten like real sand. I really wanted to do this for Katelyn's cake, but time was definitely not on my side for this one!
The fish are Goldfish crackers. I'm not sure exactly how I came up with the idea to use the Goldfish. I think I might have seen it used in one of the million cupcake decorating books I've seen in the past few months.
Originally I had made all the frosting, including what I needed to use for the writing and smaller details (bubbles, fishie faces). For whatever reason, the batch of icing I made for the white and black icing became hard as a rock, so I had to run to Micheal's at the last minute to grab a couple tubes of colored frosting to finish the job. I always wondered why on earth someone would buy frosting in a tube like that...now I know why! FAIL! ;)
It took me all day to make the cake and cupcakes, but it sure was a ton of fun to make! Now time to put my creative juices towards Aiden's birthday cake next month! Think, think, think...
