Nemo Cake

Our friend's daughter will turn 3 later this week but her party was today.  I have made her cake every year and this year was no exception.  Thanks to my fairly recent discovery of Flickr, I had lots of ideas to use.  If you ever need ideas, just check out the cakes over there.

Here is the cake:

It is a 

buttermilk cake on the top layer, chocolate buttermilk on the bottom layer.  The icing is regular buttercream.  The accents are fondant, the sand is brown sugar.  A purchase Dorie and Nemo were placed on the cake at the party.

There is always something I would change on a cake.  For this particular cake, I would have made the letter cut-outs smaller.  I only had cookie cutters to use though, so I had to make due with what I had.

The accents were really easy to make.  If I made this cake again in the summer I would probably need to mix the fondant with gumpaste or make them out of gumpaste though since fondant won't dry as well with high humidity.

For the coral pieces I rolled out fondant and used a round tip to cut holes all over it.  I then draped it over a flower former to give it some shape.  The grass is thin ribbons, I ran a cutting blade gently across the surface to make lines.  The yellow balls of coral are balls, I poked a veining tool all over to create the rough surface.  The green, orange, and yellow cups are balls that I created a divot in using a veining tool.  The purple wavy things are three thinly rolled out circles.  I bunched up the smallest one, laid it on top of the next size and bunched it up, then bunched up the third size and allowed it to dry.

This cake looks very involved, but all the pieces are really easy to make.