Mother’s Day Sea Turtle Cake

Mother’s day is a day that is set aside to celebrate the best mother you have ever known, your own mother.  It is a day you let your mother know you appreciate all the sacrifices she has made and her unconditional love.  This year, I celebrated mother’s day by combining some of the things that I love, that is spending time with my son and cake decorating.  My little man has been asking me for a few months now to make a sea turtle cake.  The ironic part is, he does not eat cake.  However, he does appreciate the beauty of a decorated cake.  So for this mother’s day I decided I would decorate a sea turtle cake with him.

Creating a sea turtle cake in one day is ambitious.

Although I knew that creating this sea turtle cake was going to take some time.  I knew that it would be all worth it.  Normally carved cakes are created over a few days; my goal was to carve, frost and cover the cake with fondant in one day so that my little man could paint it.  I carved the sea turtle out of two 10 inch square cakes. There was enough cake to create the head and the legs. Afterwards, I frosted the cake, and we headed to church.

Side story, prior to making this cake, I did a test run with my little man.  We colored a blank sea turtle that I printed from off the internet.  He told me he wanted to color his in the colors of the rainbow and I wanted to keep mine in the brown family.  When I was finished, he pointed out (because he was in charge of this project of course) that I did not use enough color.  Keeping in mind, he said I could use any color I wanted. I am no Picasso, but, I was proud of my drawing.

Putting the sea turtle cake together.

After church was over, we went to see my mother and spent some time with her.  I wanted us to get home with enough time to complete our project.

Once dinner was over, it was time to apply fondant and cut out the turtle shell.  I also used my crocodile skin texture mat to get the scales and my modeling tool for the shell and the neck.  Most importantly, the fondant needed a few minutes in the refrigerator to firm up.  While we waited for the fondant to firm up, it the time to mix the colors.  My only color brown and my little man chose blue, red and pink.  Later when the fondant was firm, we began painting.  At this point, the boss took over from the job.  I was only allowed to paint a few spots.  Nothing like being schooled by a four year old…

Final thoughts

We had a blast creating this cake…  Drawing on the scales with the modeling tool is probably a better way of getting them to look more realistic.  It’s a good idea to try to have as much fun as possible during this process.

The gallery below has the mother’s day cake pops basket that I made.