Tuna Can

Ok, so this one isn't real elegant. This cake was done as a gag for one of my managers on his birthday. He was known for eating a can of tuna every day for lunch. Since that stuff is completely vile to me, I decided I would make fun of him to delight of our office. Funny enough, people were leary about trying the cake. They were afraid it would taste like tuna. Ew! I am not about to bake a cake with fish oil to make it taste that way.

There is a technique used to smooth over the top, or sides, of a cake. You wet the spatula and smooth over the icing surface. This works really well, but has some drawbacks. First, if you don't thoroughly mix the icing and either have a clump or two of sugar, or if you use salt in your icing, the water can create spots as those ingredients dissolve. The other is that the incredibly smooth surface created from the water forms a thin hard shell. This looks great, but the risk of cracking is extremely high. If you do this, make sure the cake is on a very rigid surface, because any flexing of the cake at all will crack the icing. You can see that in the picture if you look at the top of the cake.

Basket Weave

Sorry, but our camera at the time wasn't the best. I made this one for fun. The basket weave technique is easy and can be done in many ways. It does take some patience to put on, but it certainly does look impressive though. Not my best example of this technique, but I was still in my cake infancy at the time.

Earliest Cake Photo

This is one of the earlier cakes I did as I started getting more serious about cake decorating. I did some basic ones before this, but this was pretty elaborate for me at the time. I smoothed over the top of the cake by wetting it a bit. When you do that, there is always the risk of it crackign if it moves at all, which it did. Also, if you wet it and you had coloring in the icing, it can streak and do weird things to the color as it gets suspended in the water over the icing. In this case, it added a cool effect that added to the water effect. I didn't do it again, and in this case it worked out rather well. Nemo was done freehand from a picture. Not bad, but not perfect either.