Lily Pond With Koi Cake

Entertaining, Family Money Saving Tips, Food & Entertaining, Money & Finance

When you want a showstopping cake but don’t want the showstopping bill, hack it! This cake takes its inspiration from Monet’s Water Lilies with sleek koi swimming just below the surface for a fraction of the price it would run at a bakery.

As my birthday was approaching, I began looking at cake ideas since we were having a small party. I didn’t love the typical adult birthday cakes with booze or girly stuff and I knew I didn’t want a run-of-the-mill cake either. The water lily cakes caught my eye so I set out to hack it.

What is cake hack?

So I love baking but for some reason, never can make a cake as good as even the most basic bakery. This means ordering a cake whenever I need one for a party and then doing the decorations and such myself. Not only do I get exactly what I want this way but it also cuts down the cost by quite a lot.

Base Cake

For my party, I didn’t need anything huge so an 8” round worked. I decided on vanilla cake with strawberry filling. When I went to the bakery, I showed them a picture of some of the cakes I’d seen on Pinterest and asked for a blending of blues and greens to get a water-like look. It probably could have been a bit better but for a big box store bakery and $15, it was perfect.

Decorations

For decoration, I needed water lilies, lily pads, and a koi or two. For the flowers, I couldn’t find any that looked realistic enough locally and I didn’t want to go with real ones for this cake. That lead me to Amazon where I picked a couple of options and when they arrived, settled on a set that was not only a good bargain ($15 for 2 sets!) but also realistic looking enough for my needs.

For the koi, I debated painting them on to the frosting but then found a beautiful glass koi sculpture on Amazon that was perfect. While it was $25, I planned on keeping it in my curio cabinet since I love the butterfly koi anyways.

Putting It All Together!

When I start putting a cake together, I always start from the center and closest to the cake and work my way out. In this instance, I began with the lily pads. I wanted them to give the feeling of coming out of the water which is why they overhang the edges slightly. Once they were set, I added the lilies. Looking at other cakes and pictures of lilies, I varied the height of the flowers and buds to give it a tiered effect. As lilies bloom, they grow up out of the water. Buds are right below the water’s surface or just breaking it. As they open, they get higher. By using 3, it created a triangle drawing the viewer’s eye down to the cake.

The koi, being heavier since it was made out of glass, needed to be placed to give the illusion that is was swimming below the lilies. It was too heavy to place sticking directly out of the side of the cake so I placed it on the base, one fin tucked into the cake to bring them together. It was subtle but didn’t hide it away either.

Conclusion:

In the end, I got a beautiful 8” cake with a total cost of $55 and a koi sculpture I could keep to remember it by. Had I had this same cake done by a local bakery, it would have run over $100. It only took a few minutes to do the decorations so was worth getting exactly what I imagined and saving the extra money.

Have you ever wanted a ‘fancy’ cake for your birthday or someone else’s and about choked at the price? Have you tried hacking designs you’ve seen online? Please share your story or experience below in the comments.