- This is why the cakes on Nailed It
look the way they do.
There's a lot of running in this.
Stop the timer, I need a, I need a break.
Hey guys, it's me Jasmine,
and I love food reality shows.
One that I found very entertaining
was Nailed It on Netflix.
So on the show they have these amateur bakers
bake these super elaborate cakes
in a very short amount of time.
So they had this one episode where
they're building this super massive shark attack cake
and they had to build it in two and a half hours.
I mean, it just seems impossibly difficult.
There's so many components, so many little details.
I just,
feel like this is only something
that a professional can do.
So, what I'm gonna do today,
is try the same exact challenge,
with the same exact time limit,
and see if it's really doable.
Do you think I can do it?
- No.
- Nice.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to accomplish this
but you know what?
(whispers) Its fine, its fine,
its all fine, its all great.
- Okay, ready?
Set?
Go!
- Okay, I'm gonna just make the yellow cake first.
I'm gonna breeze through this very quickly because,
madness!
All right, I'm gonna cream the butter and sugar for now,
but yeah, I'm just gonna breeze through
the batter portion of this
and then get to decorating.
I'm gonna devote most of the time to decorating.
Mix Faster! Cream faster!
All right, while that's going
I'm gonna start cracking my eggs.
Usually I'll do it one at a time
but today I don't care,
because time is of
the essence!
All right,
sorry, don't come at me.
All right, I'm gonna sift these together.
- Very efficient, with your time.
- I have to be.
There's not much of it.
It doesn't have to be the most perfect cake ever
it just needs to taste good and
look good.
Yeah, see
usually I would do this little by little, but.
Okay.
Buttermilk is in.
I gotta split this into two now.
I got my greased pans here.
Do a little bit at a time, so it's even.
I'm gonna throw these in the oven
and do this like five more times.
All right, I'm feeling pretty confident right now.
I got all the cakes into the oven pretty fast
while that's baking,
I'm gonna try to use my time efficiently,
and start making the buttercream frosting.
I need things to move faster.
Time stops for no one.
- Jasmine, would you consider yourself an amateur Baker?
- You know, I would not.
My specialty is within cooking, savory stuff.
I do enjoy baking.
I'm decent at it.
But this is just a really large cake,
I think I've made like 10 cakes in my whole life.
Gonna add in some powdered sugar now.
Oh, this part's just gonna,
its gonna, (whispers) explode.
I'm just gonna add a splash of,
this to loosen it.
A little goes a long way.
I have to make a bunch of buttercream
because it's gonna be the waves
at the bottom of this shark attack cake.
It's also gonna serve as the glue,
to hold the cakes together.
Very important.
Oh, we're also gonna need it for the crumb coat,
so the fondant has something to stick to.
All right, this is done
we're gonna make some more buttercream
and then go check on the cakes.
I'm waiting for the cakes to chill
and I can't move on until it's chilled adequately.
So I'm just letting time tick away.
Seems like a big waste of time.
All right, I aborted mission.
I'm not letting it chill for any longer
because I just need the time to decorate.
I have an hour and a half left.
Let's do this.
I'm putting some frosting at the bottom, so it'll stick.
Okay. Hold on.
You know what? I'm just,
I'll carve it down, I'll carve it down.
Things are getting real now.
This is very hard.
If I don't have a good structure,
I'm just not gonna be able to,
make a good cake or a decent cake.
Oh my goodness, It's not chilled enough.
Yeah, I really hope the structure doesn't get messed up.
if it does, I know exactly
where I went wrong.
It's so hard to spread this.
After I frost this,
I'm gonna use that second layer and stack it.
And then I have a bunch of the round cakes I made earlier.
I'm gonna stack those on top.
I'm really ripping this cake apart.
You know, it might've been a huge failure
to take this out of the
freezer early.
Everything eventually is just gonna get covered up
So this doesn't have to be super pretty.
Oh,
Oh, Oh my god.
(Whispers) I'll have to cut that part off anyway.
Okay, I'm gonna cut off the corners anyway
So I'm not too worried about that.
Oh, I broke it,
all the contestants deal with this madness.
So I'm just gonna carve around the mistakes.
Add some more frosting.
Do you see it ripping?
Maybe I should let it chill for longer
it's falling apart and this is the foundation.
The show sets too high of expectations.
They have to make these crazy cakes
and they have like no time to do it.
How are they supposed to succeed?
I don't even think the person who made the original cake
got that same time on it.
I don't think so.
Where's the truth?
Okay. Now I got to cut the tops off these cakes.
I'm cutting these so they stay flat,
and even as I stack them
and the cake won't topple over.
The big cakes are gonna be the body
of the shark!
And then the top one
are slightly smaller
because the shark's body will build and get more narrow.
Especially the nose.
This right here is like the base
like right below the sharks belly.
I would never make it on one of these food shows.
The pressure is too high.
I really don't want this cake to fall over.
So I'm going to put some dowels in there.
Not too far to the edge cause I know I'm gonna carve it.
Oh, these are quite long.
Just gonna trim these.
Okay. Got it.
Breaking a sweat.
Honestly so far so good.
I really thought this was gonna be a mess at this point.
So I'm quite happy with where we are at the moment.
I'm now stacking my smaller sized cakes.
So that means we're getting closer to the top of the shark.
I don't know how I'm gonna make the mouth yet.
I don't know.
We got one more layer left.
Gotta get these dowels in here,
so it doesn't fall over.
Left a little space for this baby.
Perfect!
I am trying to envision a shark
and then I'm gonna carve it into the shark.
I'm gonna have to slant it this way,
go back a little bit.
Like this for the mouth?
Maybe.
I don't know if that's possible anymore, actually.
I'm gonna do like a very forgiving carve,
So, there's room to fix things.
- You have less than an hour left at this point.
- God are you serious?
I have less than an hour?
I feel like as I carve
it's just getting harder to keep still.
And the shakiness is making me very wary.
All right, I really need to figure out this mouth situation.
I'm gonna stick it like this,
and have the tops rest against it,
and then cover the dowels with the frosting.
I just really hope this doesn't break.
I'm gonna add this on top
just to make it a little more...
That's not that bad.
This makes a lot more sense now.
Getting the main shape of this
is taking a lot more time than I imagined.
I'm scared that the mouth will fall apart
and I'm scared to pick it up because it's already in place.
All right, I'm going to approach this with a cake pop
sort of concept and mush everything together.
Add some frosting, also reduce waste.
Yeah. It's all gonna get covered anyway.
So it'll be,
Hey! Okay! This top down shot looks scarier
than what the shark is supposed to look like.
Got a big mouth.
Mouth open wide.
What dat mouf do?!
That's humongous. He's like so ready to eat.
Oh, this guy is starting to tilt backwards.
So I want it to stand up a little straighter.
I'm gonna add just some, some more cake to the back here.
It's like sinking.
Now I'm gonna apply the crumb coat.
I've never done this before,
but it'll be fine.
I'm just gonna get this done as fast as possible.
Because time is ticking.
I just finished the crumb coat.
I gotta add the fondant.
The original cake had like
a surfer and a surf board on it.
I don't have more time to talk actually.
I am a little worried right now
because I've never worked with fondant before.
It feels tough, but I got a really heavy rolling pin.
I think I need to make it thicker at the top
because of gravity
and it'll pull it and I don't want it to rip
but I've watched enough of cake boss to know what
can go wrong.
I, am not gonna dye it
because incorporating the color into the fondant's
gonna take way too long.
So I'm gonna spray it with the color
I can't breathe.
(Whispers) We're good.
I think this could be good.
I'm just running low on time.
So there's not enough time to be so precious.
You know what I mean?
It's not long enough.
The dowel!
I'm miserable at the moment.
I'm gonna cut it here.
I'll cover it later with some decorations.
Oh god, this cake is so big.
Oh my god, Look how much it's splitting.
(Whispering) Oh my goodness.
At what point is, giving up acceptable?
Oh no, I can't let go, I can't let go.
It's gonna break.
I gotta roll out my next piece.
Oh, I need that.
Oh my god. What am I doing?
It actually ends up rolling out faster
when you do it slowly.
It's a very strange shape that I did.
You know what?
I'm not gonna worry about that part either
because I can just cover that up with waves.
I really want to make it perfect
but I need five more hours.
We're gonna do coloring, food coloring spray.
We're gonna color our shark.
All right. Next!
Okay, mouth. Let's do the mouth.
No!
That's way brighter than I was trying to go for.
So I'm very upset about how this turned out.
But you know what, it's, I don't, I just
I don't have any time.
So it's just, it's gonna to be like this.
Gotta move on.
I'm gonna have little wrinkles in his mouth right here.
You know what? I don't like that.
Let's, let's not do that anymore.
Sharks have multiple rows of teeth.
So, gonna cut out some shark teeth.
Okay. This shark is not gonna have too many teeth.
This is sticking better than I thought.
I thought it was gonna fall off, immediately.
Please don't come at me for the anatomy.
I really don't know how the rows of teeth work.
I just know rows exist.
I was doing the two rows of teeth for the shark
but I ran out of triangles.
I just really don't have time.
I removed one of the rows of teeth
and I'm just gonna put it
on the bottom layer of the mouth just to save time.
- Okay. So you have 15 minutes left.
- No!
Take it back.
Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.
I have like literally so much to do
Oh! It looks like boba.
All right. While that dries.
I'm gonna make the surfboard.
I'm making the little surfboard tail thingy.
My surfboard. (Laughs)
All right. So I need two legs.
So this guy,
is gonna be inside the shark's mouth, getting eaten.
Making the toes.
Thankfully you don't see his full body on the cake.
So I only need to make the legs and pants.
Lovely trunks my friend.
So bad.
All right. What's next?
Really running out of time here,
Gonna throw on my blue frosting.
I am getting it everywhere but the cake,
you know, waves are never predictable,
so I think any shape and like
angle that I'm putting it on is correct.
I'm unrolling the licorice now.
This is the surf board string.
Okay. That's just gonna go there.
Oh god. This is not where a surfboard string goes.
You know what? It doesn't matter.
The string was lost.
Oh, the eyes! The eyes, the eyes, the eyes.
(Laughs) it looks so weird.
Oh I gotta give his nose, his nose
- Five, four, three, two, one! Step away.
- (Groans) You can't do this in two and a half hours,
and have it look like perfection.
I think I did better than I thought I would.
I think it came out better than
some of the other contestants cakes.
But, at the end of the day
I think I was set up for failure.
But it's fine.
Got Freddie over here.
Now it's time to invite Kelly and Annie
over here to see if they think I nailed it or failed it.
- I think Jasmine did amazing.
I'm honestly super impressed.
The swim shorts like perfectly fit the leg.
And even the eyes,
like they're like, kind of beady like a shark's.
It's really realistic.
One thing that is missing,
is the blood drooling out of his mouth,
which would have been a really fun detail.
But she was down to the wire and she still did great.
- [Jasmine] Do you think I nailed it or failed it?
- I think Jasmine nailed it.
- It's cool and impressive.
It's very colorful.
It feels like,
although you're making a very sort of,
soulless creature in a shark.
I feel like I understand Jasmine's energy in it.
The coloring on it, super cool.
If I was like peekaboo! Okay, this is a shark.
I clearly know what it is.
- [Jasmine] So overall.
Do you think I nailed it or failed it?
- It's somewhere in the middle.
We all feel like we can
nail things a little bit better next time.
Maybe that's just the situation here.
- The one thing I liked the most is that,
the texture of the spray,
is very similar to like an actual shark,
a very slippery, like shiny finish.
- [Jasmine] All right. So Annie,
do you think I nailed it or failed it?
- I think you nailed it.
- [Jasmine] (Excitedly) Really?
- Good work.
Oh my gosh!
- [Jasmine] Oh my goodness!
No!
- Oh, yes!
(Upbeat music)