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Updated on May 19, 2020 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Giant Crab Cake

Skill level: Intermediate

Liz Marek returns to teach her award-winning giant blue land crab cake. This gravity-defying piece stands over a beach and showcases realistic textures and details. Learn how to create a jaw-dropping piece from start to finish.

Please note: the final competition piece had a cake topper figurine that is not featured in this tutorial.

1:40:16 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • Learn how to create a realistic giant crab out of cake
  • How to make a gravity-defying cake structure
  • Learn how to sculpt modeling chocolate into highly detailed crab legs
  • Several tips and tricks for airbrushing cocoa butter colors
  • Learn how to create a realistic beach branch and ocean water from sugar

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Making the cake structure 0:10
  2. Bending threaded rod 2:54
  3. Assembling structure 4:52
  4. Adding armature wire 7:29
  5. Making the crab legs 10:49
  6. Adding the cake to crab 35:34
  7. Defining top of crab 37:22
  8. Ganache crumb coat 39:19
  9. Covering cake in fondant 41:04
  10. Defining the eye sockets 42:07
  11. Carving the beach 45:49
  12. More crab details 51:01
  13. Adding the sand 52:02
  14. Airbrushing the crab indentations 54:06
  15. Adding carapace texture 56:58
  16. Airbrushing crab blue 58:48
  17. Edge highlighting 1:00:44
  18. Airbrushing highlights 1:01:43
  19. Cleaning your airbrush 1:07:18
  20. Making textured fondant 1:07:46
  21. Making Rocks 1:09:48
  22. Covering cake in fondant 1:10:16
  23. Adding beach water 1:11:56
  24. Airbrushing beach 1:17:54
  25. Adding shine to water 1:18:53
  26. Adding beach wood supports 1:19:50
  27. Making beach wood branch 1:20:44
  28. Adding texture onto branch 1:21:37
  29. Making crab eyes 1:25:26
  30. Adding shine to crab 1:27:27
  31. Adding crab armor (timelapse) 1:28:03
  32. Finishing the eyes 1:37:19

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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.