Anyone who knows me will know that I am Disney/Pixar mad, so when I was asked to make a Finding Nemo cake for a school friend's daughters birthday I was delighted. They had found a cake design they wanted me to copy. The picture was an underwater theme with a model of Squirt the turtle on top, except this cake order asked for me to model Nemo on top for their Nemo-mad daughter Madison.
I really enjoyed making this cake as the pastel theme made it so cute and perfect for a first birthday party! It's a pretty plain design but I think it's so effective so props to the person who designed it in the first place.
It was quite theraputic to make all the small bits of shell, coral, pebble and seaweed. I even got carried away and added my own glittery bubbles. When I am enjoying making a cake like this it's very dangerous... in fact that I finished this cake at 3am... but was tempted to keep adding on adding. I gave in to my bed's calling though!
The biggest challenge of this cake was Nemo himself. I've used modelling paste before on my Frozen cake (which I am yet to blog about). It's great for holding shape and its much tougher than your standard sugarpaste. Colouring the white paste orange was no fun with my weak wrists! It needed A LOT of kneading to run the colour through the whole lump so it ended up being like a bingo wing workout!
For nemo once his body was shaped I rolled out, shaped and textured his fins using a modelling tool to drag lines into the fines. I was pretty impressed with how well the thinly rolled out modelling paste held its own - his fins stood up all on their own! I then added his clownfish stripes by rolling out white modelling paste very thinly and gluing them in place, before handpainting the edges with blake cake colouring.
Nemo's biggest problem for me was his face. All sugarwork can dry out very quickly when exposed to air so version 1 of Nemo had a very wrinkly faced, and quite honestly looked like Nemo's great-great-great-grandfather! I was so happy with the body and fins that I daren't try again so left him to harden up for an hour before giving him a "fondant face lift", gluing freshly rolled out paste over his wrinkly face and cutting out holes to reveal his original eyes and nose - pretty impressed with the results of the surgery too!
What the customers said:
I was extremely happy with Maddie's first birthday cake. It looked fantastic and all my guests kept commenting on how amazing it was. It tasted very yummy too!
Let me know what you think of it - and don't forget to follow me on Twitter @peasweetcakes
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