Waves Cake

For Noah's 10th birthday party, 2010. When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he said "yellow cake with blue frosting." Since he was having a swim party I decided to carry over the water theme.

I just split the two 8" rounds so that it was four layers total, with a thin layer of blue frosting between each. I just used store-bought vanilla frosting (two cans) and colored it with mostly blue and little bit of green food coloring. I made half a batch of marshmallow rolled fondant, and colored it roughly the same color as the frosting (a little darker). I rolled it out into a thin, long skinny rectangle and cut the bottom straight with a ruler (and a paring knife). I was going to make one long continuous waves wrapper for the outside of the cake but then I realized it was going to be a nightmare trying to deal with such a long thin piece of fondant, so I changed my plan and cut individual waves of different sizes and stuck them on the outside of the cake, overlapping.

To make the "hill" which is the wave on top of the cake, I used the two cut off domes from the tops of the two rounds (which I always cut off to make a nice flat top to my cakes) and I just sort of folded them in half and piled them up on half of the top of the cake. Then I microwaved some of the leftover canned frosting so that it was soft enough to sort of pour onto the crummy mess of a hill, to smear around and adhere it all together. Once that frosting had set, I rolled another piece of fondant to cover it. I actually kneaded together a piece of white and a piece of blue fondant to make it marbled, but you can't tell in this picture.

I sprinkled some water onto the flat part of the top of the cake so that the "sand" would stick to it -- Sugar in the Raw (my favorite fake sand for cakes). Before putting the sand down I peeled back the edge of the wave so it would look like the wave was washing up onto the sand. Going for realism, as always :) Just kidding.

I hoped to find an action figure of some sort that would fit into the theme; a dude in a swimsuit or something. I was very excited to find this surfing Phineas and Ferb toy at Target; my kids like that show so it was perfect.

In order to have frosting to pipe, I mixed some powdered sugar with the remaining store-bought frosting so that it was thick enough. It was light blue and I put a couple drops of blue food coloring in the frosting bag to make it come out swirly-colored. I actually made the frosting a little too thick and it was really hard to pipe; my hand got tired fast and I'm not very happy with the piping but I just had to get it finished for Noah's party -- there's no way I would've had time to remix the frosting to make it less thick. I like the way the waves on the sides look with the piping outline; it's just sloppier than I would normally do. Oh well!

Noah loved it; he said it was almost as good as his city cake from when he was 5 (seen on this post). Well, I don't know about that but I do know this one was MUCH faster to make!! That city cake was way more work. This one was fun though, and it was nice to tie in the swimming/water theme of the party.