Because Everyone Needs a Zebra Print Octopus Cake

The Association of Zoo Veterinary Technicians commissioned me to make a cake for their conference held at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward.  

Their logo has a zebra on it and they since they were spending their week at ASLC they decided on a zebra print octopus :)

This creature took me about 22 hours to make. I wanted to look as realistic and in proportion as possible.  To do that and not have a 6 foot cake base, I designed the arms to swirl around each other so that they would fit on a 2.5 foot board.

All of my cakes are from scratch so it was easy to make it a zebra print on the inside too. Everything you see is cake and fondant except for a couple of the places where the arms are in the air. Since they need to stand up, those were made with rice krispie, covered in chocolate, and then the fondant. And as usual, it was all hand carved. 

Because Love is Love

This fun one had my studio full of color.

I have been wanting to play with vertical layers for awhile now. It is one of those things that ups the wow factor as it appears like any other cake and then bazinga, look at that, there is a rainbow in the cake. This idea came from I am a baker. Instead of making a pan full of batter and cutting the rings, I used concentric cake pans to only make a single ring so I wouldn't waste a ton of batter.

The cake is a vanilla almond with apricot jam between the layers and swiss meringue buttercream frosting.

For the icing I played with both rosettes and a scallop spatula technique.

Overall, a whole lot of fun compacted into one Valentines Day cake!