Friday, May 7th
Actually, this is modeled after an octopus and not squid but who’s going to hold me to it?
For his birthday, Mr. B requested an underwater theme with an octopus on his cake. He also wished for angel food, which turned out to be the perfect light foil against the marshmallow fondant.
After the cake was cooled, I grabbed a container of pre-made icing. (It’s important to us to get the kind with no trans fats. There’s a history of heart disease & stroke in our respective families.)
Using blue food coloring, I mixed up the ocean water:
Considering I don’t have three hands, a spare drinking glass was happy to help hold my frosting bag.
Now we’re ready to go! Hold your frosting bag like this
because it makes it quite easy to squeeze as you go around the cake.
By the way, I mixed the icing blue and then added a little more coloring that I didn’t mix very well. I like how the frosting changes color depending upon how much coloration it receives. Miss Chief and I then added blue sparkles to the top of the cake and little fish sprinkles to the sides.
Using the rockin’ Marshmallow Fondant recipe from CakeJournal, I made up about 2.5 pounds of fondant. We wrapped it up tightly in plastic, sealed it and refrigerated it until the next day.
Then I got to work. I tinted about 1/3 the fondant with brown Wilton food paste. Using this image as a reference, I shaped an octopus head with siphons on each side. To do this, I rolled the fondant into an oval then pinched the siphons open. The tentacles were created by rolling out “snakes” in my hands then slightly flattening one side. The suction cups are little balls of white fondant pinched up at the edges. The tentacles also sport a thin bit of white fondant to make them more realistic.
For the eyes, I used a pancake of brown fondant wrapped around a white fondant ball. The pupils were formed by dipping a toothpick into the brown food paste and pressing against the whites.
I put the head a little down into the cake as if the octopus was either appearing from/disappearing into a deep, dark cave. One more secret – I only put suction cups on the parts of the tentacles that showed.
Needless to say, he loved it.
