Undersea Cake

Birthday’s at our house are all about the birthday cake and what it’s going to look like. For my daughter’s eighth birthday she wanted an undersea cake. Specifically, she wanted dolphin and jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish!

What’s a mom to do except make a birthday cake with jellyfish on it! This is how I did it.

I made five layers using dark blue to light teal food gel colors. Stacking each cake with a layer of vanilla buttercream frosting in between. After I got the layers stacked (BTW, I didn’t use any dowels in this cake. It’s tall, but stackable and stable) I put a crumb coat on the outside of the cake and put it in the freezer.

This made putting the next layer of frosting on easier. I made another batch of vanilla buttercream and split it into thirds, coloring each with three of the shades of blue gel coloring, starting with the dark blue on the bottom.

Next I added teal. I overlapped the teal and the dark blue about an inch.

Then I added the light green/teal and continued it onto the top of the cake. I used a kitchen bench scraper to smooth the sides: I held the bottom of the scraper up agains the side of the cake, and spun the cake stand around. This mixed the frosting colors where they overlapped, and made the frosting smooth.

For the top, I took the tip of a icing spatula and spun the stand again, making the circular marks on the top of the cake.

On the sides of the cake are chocolate candies made from silicon molds. Let me say that I loved these molds. They are even easier to use than the plastic molds I usually use for candy making.

I had jellyfish, and regular fish. I used colored candy melts (don’t try to add food coloring to candy melts, just buy them already colored. The food coloring distorts the consistency of the chocolate and won’t melt properly), melted them in the microwave and spooned them into the molds.

The dolphin on the top of the cake are made from candy melts and a dolphin mold. (Note: this particular chocolate mold doesn’t have a place for the popsicle stick. I used melted chocolate and “glued” the stick to the back of the chocolate dolphin). I added some edible silver luster dust.

I did the same for these sea shells with this sea shell candy mold. I used a confetti white chocolate candy melt for these and they came out great.

We added some crushed graham crackers on the bottom of the sea.

Here’s the inside. I always love cutting a cake like this. The kids just love to see the inside — they’re usually surprised because they love the outside so much.

A cake this tall, makes for LARGE pieces. Since these were for eight year olds, we cut every slice in half so each child got a three-layer cake piece to eat. One kid got the top layers, the other got the bottom layers.

As always, my cakes aren’t perfect, but they are a work of love for my kids. This one was no different.