Cake makers, please could you help me?

[hushabyehill]

i would like to have a go at making something like this:

www.cake2thailand.com/-pi-66.html

• for my son's 5 birthday but am a complete novice!

Can I make all the figures with marzipan, and how would I colour them? Can I paint the colour on or do I need to colour whole sections of marzipan first? And will I be able to mix colours?

Would I make the 'sea' bits with royal icing on top of buttercream? I was going to make chocolate sponge for the base.

Any advice or any other tips would be hugely appreciated!

I am overseas so if anyone could also recommend any good online shops for supplies that would be brilliant too.

Thanks x

You need modelling paste to make figures. They sell them in colour packets in Lakeland (Regal Ice) who are very reputable. Dr Oetker also do colour sugar paste. Not tried using marzipan at all.

You can mix colours with paste colouring. Liquid colours tend to make the icing too sticky.

For the sea bits, you can just colour white sugar paste with blue colouring and roll out to the shape that you want it.

Ebay should have endless options of cake decorating equipment and ingredients.

Brilliant, thank you!

Probably a really stupid question but could anyone tell me how I should stick the decorations onto the cake too? Thanks

Dab of royal icing you can buy it ready made in any supermarket if you don't want to make your own.

Paint a dab of water very sparingly onto the back/bottom of whatever you are trying to stick on, much easier than faffing around with royal icing.

Don't soak it though as it will slide around and start to dissolve the icing.

Great, thanks! Will it be ok to lay royal icing over buttercream?

Erm, I wouldn't have thought so but I only ever work with fondant/sugarpaste so I don't know for certain.

However, by royal icing, do you mean the stuff made with egg white and icing sugar that you put on with a spatula and sets very, very hard or the stuff that comes in blocks that you knead and roll out?

The egg white/icing sugar is royal icing, the blocks are sugar paste/fondant/ready to roll icing which can certainly be put on top of buttercream as that is what 'sticks' it to the cake.

I'm assuming when you say 'lay' it on that you probably mean sugarpaste and looking at the picture, the darker blue sea is definitely sugar paste rather than royal icing while the multi coloured bits around the edges are just coloured buttercream.

Thanks, that's really helpful. I didn't realise royal icing was the hard stuff, so I definitely want the ready to roll sugar paste. I had just assumed that the multi-coloured bits around the edges were sugar paste too. Would coloured buttercream be easier?

Thanks ever so much, i really am a bit clueless but desperately want to pull this off as I know my son will be thrilled. He is obsessed with mermaids :)

There's not much in it, in terms of which one would be easier. If you use buttercream then you'll need to do a crumb coating first, put it in the fridge to harden then do the coloured layer over the top so the top layer isn't full of bits of crumbs.

If you use sugarpaste then you will need to cover the whole cake in buttercream then stick cut out pieces of the sugarpaste onto it.

Brilliant, thanks. So what I'm thinking is - make the basic shape with sponge stuck together with buttercream; a layer of buttercream over the top of it all; then a layer of 'sea' sugarpaste all over; followed by extra pieces of sugarpaste for the light blue bits; then the mermaid, fish etc. made with marzipan.

Do you think that sounds do-able? And sorry to go on! x

That sounds spot on!

Good luck, feel free to come back with more questions while you're making it .

Thanks! His birthday is on the 21st so I'll be making it in a couple of weeks. Will let you know how it turns out x