You know one of the things that you need to do if you are into cake decorating? You have to know what kids like! Mostly, you have to be familiar with lots of cartoon and computer game characters. Unfortunately for me, I am no longer at an age where I’d like to spend my days watching Disney channel or Nickolodeon, and I have no kids of my own to force me to do this. So, to be quite honest, I have only gotten myself acquainted with several characters when I got cake requests for them.

Sponge Bob was one of these characters, although he’s been here since May 1999 (according to Google). I never liked him. Why? Well, I didn’t watch a lot of TV back in the day because we still didn’t have cable then (Did I mention that we live in the woods? Hahahaha, just kidding! But seriously, it took us a long time to have cable television). And on those rare times when I did get to watch Sponge Bob at my grandma’s house with my cousins, I thought the cartoon was pretty stupid. A yellow character that looked like Scotch Brite wasn’t interesting at all to me. I didn’t understand why a lot of kids were fascinated with him.

Oh well. Sponge Bob and his best friend Patrick are still popular after more than 15 years. I wonder why they remain well-loved. But as a cake decorator who wants to make my customer’s cake dreams come true, I am in no position to question. My job is to make a cake.

I don’t find him particularly endearing, but one of my first attempts at making a tutorial is that of a Sponge Bob cupcake topper. I made this tutorial two years ago and posted it originally on my old blog, but I thought I’d copy the post and share it again here.

Enjoy!

 

These are the tools that you will need: round cutters, square cutter with scalloped edges, round icing tips for the smaller circles, brushes for cleaning up the fondant pieces and for applying water to glue pieces together, fondant modelling tools especially the half circle and ball tips. Make sure that your large circle cutter is as big as the top of your cupcake. You will also need yellow, white, and blue fondant, a black food writer OR black royal icing.

Cut out your fondant pieces: one Sponge Bob face will be a circle to cover a cupcake, the other one will be in Sponge Bob’s natural shape to serve as a standing topper.

Let’s now make the eyes. Cut two white circles and two smaller blue circles.

Stick the blue circle over the white. Using a black edible marker or black royal icing, place a black dot in the middle of the blue circle to serve as the pupils of Sponge Bob’s eye.

Get a small piece of yellow fondant and roll a small tubular shape to serve as the nose. You can stick a  small piece of toothpick through it to make it stand. Also cut a small rectangular shape of white fondant to serve as teeth. Press a line in the middle to white rectangle to make it look like two teeth showing out of his mouth. Assemble the pieces as shown. Use black food marker or black royal icing to place details (eyelashes and lip line). Take your ball tip fondant modelling tools and randomly press all over his face to give him a spongy look.

Here’s how Sponge Bob should look like at this point. This piece is now ready to go on top of a cupcake.

Now for the Sponge Bob shape face. After cutting a square piece of yellow fondant, tilt your cutters at an angle  to cut the sides. Use the scallops as a guide. For this shape, I took the corner-most scallop as a reference and aligned the cutter to the end of the second scallop at the lower side. This means that you take out two scallops from each end at the lower side.

Here’s how it should look after cutting out the sides. Insert a toothpick for support. Follow the steps shown above in assembling the details of the face.

Here’s the finished product! Search online for different Sponge Bob expressions.

I hope you all find this useful. Let me know!