Our 1st birthday party!

 This week has been nuts.  Baby boy was sick last weekend so prepping for the party was almost non-existent.  He was feeling better monday but only made it a half day before I took him to the pediatrician to get diagnosed with our 3rd ear infection.  I'm looking forward to the end of cold and flu season so we don't have to spend quite so much time there!

Yesterday was baby boy's first birthday party and everything went spectacularly well (minus one of our guests who got hurt and couldn't come :(  ).  When planning for this big day I really wanted to make his cake!  I love to bake but working full-time doesn't always allow for that.  We looked around for a sheet cake that would go along with the aquarium theme but the only thing we could find was a Nemo cake.  I love Disney but the cake wasn't cute enough for the $30 the store wanted for the cake so we compromised: I made his smash cake and I redecorated a Costco cake for the "big people".

Using my mental picture and a few tips I picked up from watching Cake Boss on maternity leave I gathered my ingredients last weekend.  Husband picked up the cake

Using an inverted spatula I scraped off the decorations, smearing them rather than removing them if it was going to affect the border.  I was careful around the writing because I wanted that to stay smooth.

 

Then I added brown sugar lightly to where I felt the bottom of the tank should be and added chocolate rocks over it

 Next I mixed piping gel and gel food coloring together to get water (got that trick from watching Cake Boss).  For some reason I decided the water was a bit too clear so I added a table spoon of the icing I removed from the cake.  It made the water cloudy but almost more believable since I was going to put fish on top.  I really liked the effect!

 

I actually didn't start off wanting to blog about this.  I took the pictures because I find that I notice things that look off more easily if I look at it on my camera's screen.  I've done this with quilts and other art projects and in this case I noticed that the blue was a little funky on the right side so I corrected it.

 

I got the water effect even more by swirling the inverted spatula into the white icing so the blue wasn't smooth and its thickness varied.

 Then I grabbed my pizza cutter and made wavy patterns on fruit leather. I knew from an experiment a few weeks ago that the "plants" looked more lifelike when they were rolled in addition to laid flat. I also learned the the fruit roll-up of my youth just seems too sticky to work with (I've also tried to make dessert sushi) so I used fruit leather, which also seems to taste better.  I added the fish (at least one was "hiding" behind a plant) and then gummy fish all the way around the cake!

 

These adorable little guys are a gluten-free carrot cake leftover from the smash cake with a greek yogurt-cream cheese cake and were perfect "swimming" around the main cake.

The decorating took about 30 minutes including taking pictures and I got rave reviews!