We’re in love with colorful cakes today and have one more to share with you. We made this giant 3 and a half foot cake for our husband’s birthday kids, yeah that’s it kids—and it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. It’s not as hard as you might think, click through to see how to make a giant swimming invertebrate of your own!
Making a 3.5′ octopus from cake takes less effort than you think, but does require the use of 2 cake boards to keep things together. If you make this fun cake for a birthday celebration, you can stick candles in your poor octopus, or make a smaller cake for candles on the side, the choice is yours. Here’s what you’ll need:
• Sheet Cake
• Rice Krispie Cereal
• Marshmallows + Butter
• Fruit Loops Cereal
• Nerds Candy
• Frosting
• 2 Cake Boards
Start with a baked and cooled sheet cake (which can be purchased pre-made if you’re looking to make the process even easier). Cut in on the sides, like an hour glass, or shapely womanly figure (hubba hubba), like this:
The excess cake can be placed on top of the cake for eyes, or snacked on while you work–bonus!. Next, make Rice Krispie treats according to the package directions and mold them into tentacles and as facial bump outs (assuming you’re like us and ate the previously mentioned extra cake).
Frost the entire thing in the color of your choice, we did blue, but purple, pink or even green could work out just fine! Now our frosting looks a little less than professional, when we made our cake earlier, it was nearing 100 degrees in our kitchen and we were doing good to keep things together, so you can leave it “rustic” as we have, or take a little more time at smoothing things down.
Next, add Fruit Loops and nerds to decorate your octopus, we love the look of the multicolor cereal as the suction cups on each tentacle and the burst of extra flavor (As well as color) that the nerds gave. You are welcome to use a candy or decoration of your choosing, just mosey around the cereal and candy aisles for a bit and see if anything strikes your fancy. Remember, gummy candies can be rolled out to create larger vibrant colored shapes as well (which was the route we almost went before settling on Fruit Loops).
That’s all there is to it, you don’t have to be a professional baker, or even experienced backer to create something fun, plus the frosted tentacles are just as tasty as the rest of the cake, and you can eat it with your hands!
What’s been the most adventurous cake you’ve ever made?
Share a link or leave us your thoughts in the comments below!
(Images: Sarah Rae Trover)
Originally published 11.20.09 – JL
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This is totally awesome. I would add a beak, and I would make the tentacles out of rows of cupcakes. Or at least some of the tentacles, since that would be a lot of cupcake baking to make that many. You can join the cupcakes by frosting them together. If you don’t like frosting, you will want to squish the cupcakes up pretty close to each other to cut down on the amount of frosting used to “bridge”.
view frum’s profile
By the way, you are not married to PZ Myers, are you?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
view frum’s profile
Fruit Loops as the tentacles = GENIUS>
But no beak, please! It freaks me out enough that an octopus has one in real life!
view patrick (the other one)’s profile
HEY! I just made this for my niece’s 6th bday. I basically copied you tentacle for tentacle. x3 My sister put on the nerds and I did NOT LIKE IT. No, really it was fine. It had a lemon cream cheese frosting and vanilla cake.
http://i46.tinypic.com/2ajrq1k.jpg
thank you for your post!!!
view Raahaachel’s profile
This cake looks absolutely wonderful and soooo fun! The Fruit Loop tentacles are a stroke of genius!
But I have to say, Rice Krispie treats with frosting and sugary cereal do not sound delicious. Did that part of the cake get eaten?
view Griffin’s profile
That part of the cake did get eaten, it wasn’t as awesome as the cake itself, but it worked out ok. Taking the suggestion above and making tentacles from cupcakes might yield tastier (though not as formed and pretty) results!
view sarahrae’s profile
Here is another blue octopus cake (and some other fun stuff):
Cakewrecks
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/12/seasonings-greetings.html
view wallace’s profile
Blackbird’s 2nd Birthday Cake, modified from this Instructable’s tutorial.
view alisa k’s profile
Here’s a list of some of the se7en bazzilion cakes we have made. With se7en 1 kids we do a lot of “caking”…
http://www.se7en.org.za/2008/08/27/se7en-bazzillion-cake-ideas
view se7en’s profile
I lovelovelove this. Amazing.
view amandaleedotorg’s profile