How to Make a Jellyfish Cake

My best friend has always wanted a jellyfish. I can’t afford to give her such a gift, so I went with what I know! Cake, of course. I knew to make this work I would need to build a stand.
I purchased two metal plates and a clear orange glass vase. I hot glued these together to make a stand. Make sure your top plate is the same size as your cake.

I dropped two battery operated tea lights in there. Thankfully, they stayed lit through the party, which was hours later!
My tentacles were next.
I used Airheads candy. I didn’t think fondant would hold up. I assumed it would tear and droop.
I microwaved each piece of candy for four seconds (based on trial and error, 5 seconds was too long, believe it or not.)… Then rolled it into a thinner strip. I cut those into smaller strips and twisted them, setting them aside to cool.

Each strip I then attached to the top plate with melted white chocolate. This will harden and hold the strips firmly in place.

Next I went to work on my cake. I baked three cakes in decreasing size in order to carve a dome. The bottom cake is the same size as the plate on top of my stand. That is important later.
I placed the cake on a board that was slightly smaller than the bottom layer. That way I will be able to easily lift the cake on to the stand, but it will also sit flush on it.

I carved the cake and iced it.

Next, I elevated the cake and laid the fondant over it. I trimmed it to hang slightly over the cake so that it would cover the stand plate and have the fluid jellyfish look to it.
I pleated it a bit and then transferred the cake to the stand.

Once on the stand I hand painted some details with food color gel mixed with high proof vodka. I even sprinkled a bit of luster dust over it.
I piped a happy birthday message for the birthday girl and it was done!

It was a huge hit at the party. Everyone loved pulling the tentacles off and eating them with their cake!

I’d say this was a great example of turning one of my crazy ideas from my brain into a real, working concept! Love it :)

Good News Everyone!

Well, it’s my very own birthday on Monday. I’ll be… twenty- eight. Woo. I had a brief moment of panic lying in bed last night thinking about how tragically old I am and how I’m going to be ancient and dead any time now.
Then I realized I’m not even 30 yet and I’m making myself a cartoon birthday cake and I’m going to drink like a 21 year old tonight. Then I felt a little better.

Anyhow, on to the cake!
My favorite show of all time is Futurama. And my favorite character on that show is Bender Bending Rodriguez!
So, first of all, this is my birthday, and I’m the cake chick… so my cake has to be awesome. I started with 6 layers of cake. Chocolate, strawberry and vanilla!

I leveled them and stacked them.


This thing is like a foot tall and weighs a ton. I stuck it in the freezer for a bit before carving it.

This was not an icing job for the faint of heart. That’s for sure. All that exposed cake is hard to frost without tearing if you aren’t experienced and using the proper tools. I had to keep heating my spatula in hot water, it turned out well though.

I set it in the fridge to cool a bit while I rolled out the fondant.

My fondant ended up with a weird line in it from when I rolled it onto the rolling pin, but it’s ok, his eyes will cover that.
I mixed up some of my edible silver and painted the whole thing.

Then I added a mouth, which I drew on with food color markers.

Starting to look Bendery! Also, I added his antenna which is part of the dowel I pushed into the cake to keep it from sliding around. It’s just a wooden rod I covered with fondant on top.

I’d LOVE to show you my process of making the eyes, but it was a mess lol. First, I cast eyes out of white chocolate, but they turned out to be too small… so I went with these. It was okay, but the visor was really hard. I ended up sort of stacking two fondant ropes around the eyes. It’s not perfect, but it worked. I also made a cigar, of course.

“Happy Birthday meat bag!”

Happy birthday to me! I planned on cutting it into pieces of each flavor, but who knows, maybe I’ll take the first slice and get a bit of each ;)

Tutorial Tuesday: How to make a checkerboard cake

This was my first attempt at a checkerboard cake. If I could do it all again, there are things I would do differently, for sure. So keep an eye on that commentary. I’ll say this is a more advanced project. If you’re not already pretty great at frosting cakes, this probably won’t end well for you.

I started with two different color cake layers which I then sliced into four thinner cake layers. Mistake #1. I either should have made four layers the original size… or I should have just worked with the two layers as they were.
I let the cakes freeze for a while so they’d be easier to cut. Then I found some round things… like bowls and containers that I could use as guides to cut rings out of the cakes about two inches apart.

I arranged my layers and then put some wax paper on my board and some frosting to hold down the first layer.

Carefully place each layer and carefully frost the top of it. Using hot water on your spatula will help you to keep from shredding the cake. Stack and frost each layer. Don’t forget to alternate color schemes. It’s a labor of love.

Once it’s all stacked, you can sort of smoosh it down with your hands maybe… you can see here why my layers being too thin was an issue. Once I got to this part, I was starting to panic. It sort of looks awful…
Somehow, I used my cake frosting magic to turn that into this:

From there I chilled the cake for a while and then covered it in fondant.

My results were decent…

If nothing else, strawberry and lemon always taste wonderful together.

I had a great time this weekend in Wisconsin with my bff Liz. If I get time, I’ll add some great photos from our trip at the end of this post soon!