Jenny Makes a Catfish Cake.

I was planning on making this cake as a dessert for the Connoisseurs Seafood Cookoff, but I ended up not having enough time or space to finish it that day. I put it together a few days late.

My idea was to create a very realistic, slimy, and wet-looking catfish cake with realistic looking insides. I wanted to make the whole process as simple as possible, so I started with boxed cake mixes rather than hand making the cakes.

The main ingredients I used were yellow cake mix, white chocolate pudding, strawberry jam, green tea tapioca pearls, and marzipan.

I started off by baking the cake, hollowing out the inside, lining it with strawberry jam, pudding, and tapioca pearls, and turning it filled-side down onto the serving plate.

The butter crème icing was put on in layers, chilling after each layer, and then smoothing it all down. The layering continued, gradually changing the color of the frosting and finally smoothing it all down with some water to achieve the desired “wet-effect”.

The fins and tail, I sculpted from marzipan, some of which I dyed with food coloring.

I originally wanted to make the eyes out of hard candy, but I settled for some taxidermy fish eyes I had laying around the studio.

The tapioca pearls looked really cool, but toughened up more than I expected in the pudding.

In the future I would use a white cake mix to give the insides a fishier color and contrast a little more with the red jam.

I was surprised that, with all my focus on the appearance of the cake, it was still rather good. Connoisseur Jon singlehandedly ate the entire head and Connoisseur Tom helped himself to a couple of fillets, both seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.