Fishy Cake

Back when I shared the details of Max's birthday party I kind of promised I'd be back with details of the cake and decorations. Umm yeah, didn't quite happen sorry! Between having a baby, Christmas and my etsy shop things got a little crazy in December. But as promised here are the details of the cake :).

Before I tell you about the cake though, I want to share the invites I had made for the party. They were done for me by the very talented Julia at Kuku Couture Invitations. If you need invitations for any occasion you have to go check her out. She's an absolute dream to work with and makes the most gorgeous designs.

Now for the cake!

After pinning images like this and this I knew that I wanted to do scalloped icing, but with a more fishy feel to it. My plan was for it to look a bit like fish scales all over the cake.

I started off by making three dense chocolate mudcakes, then I layered them together with buttercream (the recipe I used is here) and crumb coated the whole lot. I'm by no means an expert at crumb coating (or cake making for that matter), to see how to do a good crumb coat you can check out this tutorial here.

Once the crumb coat had firmed up in the fridge for half an hour I started with the scalloped icing. Using the same buttercream I made up three different colours, blue, green and white, and then I half filled three seperate piping bags.

To get the scalloped fish-scale look I piped a series of icing dots vertically down the cake using number 12 round tips on my icing bags (I forgot to take a picture at the start, but you can see the dots in the picture below).

 

Once each vertical row of dots was done I would take the end of a teaspoon, push it into the middle of the icing dot and then drag it to the right. Then it was just a matter of repeating the entire way around the cake. I tried to keep my colour patterns nice and random for that fish scale look.

After the sides of the cake was finished I did the same thing around the top of the cake.

It was time consuming (it took me about 5 hours to ice all up!!), but definitely worth it, everyone loved it and it tasted delicious!

For the party I also made some fishing pole cupcakes (or rod-n-fish cakes as Max liked to call them!). They were super simple. I saw the idea on pinterest and went from there. I made vanilla cupcakes, piped a swirl of blue buttercream on top of each and then added a little fishing rod that I made out of bamboo skewers, twine and gummy fish. Super cute!

There you have it, Max's Fishy Cake... Better late than never right!?

(If you'd like to see more from Max's party you can see the party photos here and details of the party bags here.)