Nailed It is a Netflix baking competition where non-professional cake decorators with questionable skills do their best to reproduce fancy and artistic cakes in a short amount of time. The cakes are based on their taste and appearance, both of which are often bad, and the results are often disasterous. For Valentine’s Day, Susan came up with the idea of having our own “Nailed It” cake decorating competition. The day before Valentine’s Day Susan found a picture of this cake online, and recreating it to the best of our ability was the challenge.
Just like on the show, Morgan, Susan and I were required to use lots of things to recreate the came. The “gift box” the puppy was in was made of cake, covered in fondant. The puppies were sculpted from Rice Krispy treats and covered with buttercream icing. Prior to the competition Susan had already baked the cakes and Rice Krispy treats and had all the icing mixed up. We focused our competition on the design more than the actual baking.
With everything we needed ready to go, we grabbed our supplies and got to decorating! None of us had ever used fondant before, which comes in chunks that can be rolled out into sheets and draped over cakes for a super clean and smooth look. I found a shot glass was just the right diameter to cut out polka-dots with, but made a rookie mistake by not moving my cakes onto the presentation board early enough. We originally set a time limit of one hour to decorate our cakes, although because there were no cameras rolling we gave ourselves a few extra minutes to wrap things up. Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned.
After all the cakes were done, the best cake was obvious, as was the worst. Here are the final results!
FIRST PLACE: MORGAN O’HARA
Morgan’s cake turned out amazingly well. From the piped-on hair to the ribbon on top of the dog’s head, Morgan indeed nailed the cake’s design. I literally think this is the first cake Morgan has ever decorated and we were all surprised at how well it turned out.
SECOND PLACE: SUSAN O’HARA!
The dog Susan made didn’t look quite like the puppy in the picture, but it was still recognizable as a dog (that is until a few minutes later, when the front of its face fell off). Her bow was a little more droopy and there were a few other minor issues, but it was a close race and it still looked pretty great.
FAR, FAR THIRD PLACE: ROB O’HARA
I’m… not quite sure where to begin. I rolled the fondant out too thin, which caused it to tear. I tried adding more fondant to the sculpted head to give it some shape but it just made it lop-sided. We didn’t have black fondant so I smeared brown icing on his nose which made it look like my dog had been eating poop. Without any black fondant I ended up using red for the eyes which made my dog look like it had the mange. I’ve never tied a ribbon in real life and making one with icing is tough.
The one good thing about ugly cakes is that they still taste like cake, and now we have three sitting out on the counter. We had such a fun time decorating them and spending time together in the kitchen on Valentine’s Day. Who knows, maybe this will become an annual Valentine’s tradition!