Finding Nemo Cupcake-Cake, Part 3

And now for the fun part...putting it all together!  A cupcake-cake is actually very simple to put together.  You will need a base of some sort - I used a piece of cardboard that I had covered with cardstock paper from a craft store.  Once your cupcakes are cooled (or thawed, if they were frozen), place them on your board to get an idea of what shape you'll arrange them in.

Once you are happy with the shape, pick each cupcake up and pipe a small amount of icing on the bottom - this will act as glue to hold them all in place.  Be careful how much you use - I used too much and the icing is visible:

Once the cupcakes are in place, you will then fill in the spaces between each cupcake with icing.  I used the Wilton tip 1A for this, but you could use an empty coupler or just snip a hole in a ziplock:

Next you want to pipe an outline of icing around the entire shape.  This will help to give your cake clean edges:

Then use your piping bag to fill in the outline with icing.  Use an offset icing knife (or regular knife) to smooth out the icing and fill in all of the areas.  Once you're done it will look like a cake from the top:

Once the cupcake-cake is iced, you can decorate as you wish.  In addition to the decorations that I made I used laffy taffy (watermelon flavour) for the seaweed, the Finding Nemo action characters that I bought from the Disney store, some blue raspberry tube candy that I found in the bulk section of my local grocery store, chocolate candy rocks from a candy store, and pearlized white non-pareils that I had lying around from some wedding cupcakes that I had done.  Here was the final product:

The birthday girl and her guests were very happy with the results!  It was a big hit and I will definitely be doing cupcake-cakes again, especially for kids parties!