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Updated on September 30, 2026 by · This post may contain affiliate links · Leave a Comment

Squid Contessa Cake Timelapse

Skill level: Newb

The Squid Contessa was created for the Sugar Spooks 2016 Collaboration and was based off the artwork of Omar Rayyan. She is made from modeling chocolate, fondant and a structure of aluminum foil and foam because I wanted to keep her forever and ever haha! I used Magic Chocolate to mold the tentacles and face and she is painted with cocoa butter.

You can purchase the skull mold from www.decoratethecake.com

21:38 Minutes of Instruction over Timelapse

What You Will Learn

  • How to make a cohesive color palette when painting a design
  • Structure for the tentacles of the Squid Contessa construction
  • Tips on how to work with cocoa butter for hand painting onto modeling chocolate
  • Liz Marek talks about the overall approach of working on an intense project

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.

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