My husband loves sushi so I figured that would be this years cake. I got some ideas from this site and if I study the real thing my cake looks more realistic, so a ton of time staring at pictures of real sushi.
For the base, it’s a 1/2 sheet cake in lemon with Bavarian cream filling and lemon frosting. I used caramel-vanilla marshmallows to make the marshmallow fondant, with a little brown gel food color added. I cut it in strips to make it look like a wooded board.
Now for the sushi, the base is homemade rice crispy treats. For the Nigiri sushi I hand formed little mounds by squishing them really hard to make sure they stayed firm. Then they got a dip in vanilla chips (not white chocolate that is too cream colored). I stuck them with a bamboo skewer to dip them, then into unsweetened coconut,(the almost powdered kind) and set to dry.
For the rolled sushi I made a loaf of the rice treats and let it completely dry/harden over night. Then with a serrated knife I cut 1/4 inch sliced off to make the sushi, if it has little holes it is OK because they are getting covered.
Then I took my sushi rolling mat and covered it with plastic wrap, cut everything to the right height and used the mat to roll them up. For the nori (seaweed) it’s a grape fruit roll, make sure it’s the dark almost black purple.
Starting in left top corner and going clock wise:
1. Salmon – watermelon licorice sticks microwaved and rolled between two pieces of parchment, NOT WAX paper. Cut to size
2. spider crab roll, flattened bananas from Trader Joe’s, cut to strips and laid in the inside so its sticking out of two of them and it looks like they where cut from the same roll.
3. sea urchin – apricot logs with the coconut scraped off, rolled and mashed then painted with corn syrup to make shiny.
4. California roll – inside green and yellow taffy candies to make the avocado , green Twizzlers cut to match stick for the cucumber, and left over ‘salmon’ wrapped half around a 1/2 mini marshmallow for the crab. Then rolled in the grape fruit roll and rolled up in the rice treat. carefully dipped and rolled.
5. egg sushi- unsweetened mango wrapped with a thin strip of the grape ‘nori’
6. calamari – grapefruit gummy candy melted and cut
7. tuna- mango painted with red food color then corn syrup
8. fish eggs- boba tea tapioca pearls cooked in orange and cherry Koolaid and extra food color added, then tossed in honey to sweeten,and painted with corn syrup. ( these only hold about 3-4 hours)
9. BBQ eel- flatted dried banana cut to size with honey colored with brown to make the eel sauce.
10. tuna roll- dried papaya cut to size
11. giant clam – dried apple cut to shape wrapped in ‘nori’
The tops of the rolled sushi where painted with vanilla melted candy and carefully rolled in the coconut taking care not to get any on the interior or the grape fruit roll. The wasabi is left over green and yellow candied softened and mixed together and the ginger is a thinner piece of the ‘salmon’ cut into strips . Everything is glued down with white chocolate so it wouldn’t fall off and all the raw fish is pained with corn syrup to make more realistic looking. It transported really well this way.
That is absolutely BRILLIANT… great work lots of time and love went into this cake.