My first ever birthday cake...

This was my first ever birthday cake. I was standing in a store one day and this cake was on the front of a magazine. I ended up buying the magazine and making this cake for my oldest son's 2nd birthday.

It was a lot of work, but so much fun to make!

This was actually my second attempt at the cake. The ocean is made out of jello and the first time around, I made the ocean to close to0 the edge and the cake broke. I learned that lesson real quick! After that, it wasn't too bad....just lots of work with all the small details. I prepared the mermaids and swimmers ahead of time. Their suits/hair were made from icing and the mermaid tails were made from fruit roll ups. I also learned a lesson with those as well...fruit roll ups are VERY hard to work when they are warm. They end up being very hard to unroll and super sticky. The best thing to do is place them in the fridge. A million times easier!!

The seaweed is also made from fruit roll ups. As you can probably tell, the fish are just different colored Goldfish snack crackers with icing for eyes. The life preservers are mints with red icing. The treasure chests I believe are those treasure chocolate candies with icing for decoration. The boat is a Twinkie covered in frosting with a fruit roll up sail. It is "tied" in place with Twizzler "rope" and attached to some pretzel sticks. The "rocks" are chocolate covered raisins and the sand is Graham Cracker Crumbs.

As you can imagine, it ended up being pretty costly due to the many items needed to put this cake together. It was well worth it though, because I accomplished my goal of making this cake and I was happy with the end result. The only bad thing, is that nobody ate it at the party! They didn't want to damage it. My husband ended up taking some to work the following week! At least it didn't go to waste after all.