Turtle Birthday Cake

A sweet little girl I know..well not so little anymore-she just turned 10...loves turtles so I thought I'd try making a turtle shaped cake. I've never made a shaped cake before but I've layered them and decorated them before so how hard can it be, right?
Now I'm no artist when it comes to drawing but I figured it would be pretty easy. So I looked online to find some turtle cakes and came across some pretty good looking turtles..if you can even call a turtle 'good looking'..but, you get my drift. I'll post the steps of how I achieved this uh...'good looking' turtle.

Here's my final masterpiece.

I had some bananas getting pretty ripe and figured I'd make a banana cake. Mmmm I thought banana bread was good. This tops it by far. The recipe I found here.
I didn't measure the bananas I just used three because mine weren't very big. I used my own frosting recipe and just kinda made up the filling recipe. I'll post those later.

I didn't have any plates or trays big enough to hold it so I used the back of a sheet cake pan. Yup, put it straight on. Looking at the pics afterward I'm thinking I should have at least covered the pan with tin foil or something. Oh well.

I started with the frame of the turtle. A bit easier than I thought it would be.
I need to learn photoshop. That little hand is my 5 year old daughter's. Had a hard time keeping her off the cake.

Freeze it first before frosting, trust me. After I froze mine and rounded the top layer I decided I should've put another layer on so I added one under the frozen layers. Didn't freeze it. It didn't trim as good. It was crumbly. So learn from my mistakes so you don't have to. Freeze first!

The filling I used was a basic chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe with a banana blended in with it.
I should have made more to eat myself. Like a pudding or something. Banana chocolate pudding...now that is good stuff.

I figured I'd do all the light green stuff first so that I could just turn the extra into the dark green stuff to fill in the lines

Oh my, Mr. Turtle is on somethin'.


I need to work on getting the frosting smoother. But who has the time when you've got more important things to do, like...eating cake?


Once again the final deal.

It was a good learning experience, for example, on how not to draw turtle faces. But she loved it and it tasted sooo good. Banana and chocolate, how could you possibly go wrong. I was going to take a close up of a sliced piece so you could see the yummy chocolaty filling but...well, we ate it. (Sorry Mr. Turtle).