sushi cake!

One of Jordyn's friends had requested a sushi cake as her birthday present, and we were very excited (and quite nervous) to take up the challenge!

Now all of the credit for this amazing idea goes to the super talented blogger Heather, from Sprinklebakes!

Her blog was one of the very first food blogs I discovered, EVER!  And was actually the reason why I started blogging in the first place!

HERE is where you can find the recipe for these wonderful matcha sushi rolls!

Essentially, you make a matcha sponge cake in a 9x13 (like you would bake a jelly roll), fill it with buttercream, and VERY GENTLY roll it up!

Then, you pop it in the freezer to set, and once it's firm you can start slicing!

Now, we found that our roll wasn't quite perfectly circular...so we just gently molded each roll into shape.

Orange sprinkles were used to represent roe....and then we also sliced up some cantaloupe, as well as used a few pomegranate seeds to represent tuna and roe respectively.

We also used edible green paper (which we found in the baking aisle of Michaels) as our faux grass, and green butter cream icing for our wasabi.  Jordyn rolled out several pink starbursts and then molded them to represent ginger!  And finally, we used chocolate as our "soy sauce".

We also made a giant California Roll cake out of a two-tiered chocolate cake!

{Side Note: Now, I want to say that the jelly roll is definitely NOT for beginner bakers.  A lot can go wrong, and even Jordyn and I had a bit of trouble rolling ours without too much cracking occurring.  And it takes a VERY long time!  I would definitely recommend our faux California roll if you're a newbie...it's MUCH easier!}

We covered the entire thing with a crumb coat of butter cream to start out with, and let the cake chill.  Then we added a thin layer of butter cream only to the sides of the cake, and very quickly and CAREFULLY pressed green edible paper on top.  (We measured our edible paper, and trimmed it to the height of our cake beforehand.)

We used large flake coconut for the "rice", shredded coconut dyed pink (using gel dye) for the "crab", and honeydew as the "cucumber".  

Everything was a hit at the party, and Jordyn and I are so happy to have been able to try out something so adventurous!

p.s. ♥ kelsey + jordyn