In honor of the FOURTH season of Nailed It! debuting on Netflix, I thought I would share a super fun dinner party night we had with our friends last year! A Nailed It! cake decorating contest!
Please note, this was definitely before quarantine, so while you can’t do this in person with a large group of friends right now, you can do this with your quarantine crew, or even try it virtually!
Some of my very best friends in the whole wide world have been my besties since we were in 2nd grade. Thankfully, all of our now husbands are friends too (did they have a choice?) and we just know our children will be besties for life. We will find any excuse to hang out and it usually involves food! We all LOVE watching baking shows together and we especially love Nailed It!, so we decided to have our very own Nailed It! competition!
We set very strict rules and guidelines (not really) and had our husbands judge the final winner. Our husbands are also super fun and took this very seriously. They had a grading rubric, sat at the kitchen table in hushed conversations while we waited patiently in the other room, and they even walked in from outside while playing the music to The Great British Baking Show. Totally wrong show but we loved the dedication.
Honestly, we all surprised ourselves with how well the cakes turned out and they were all so tasty! Full disclosure, we gave ourselves four hours to bake and create our masterpieces, so we definitely had more time than the contestants on Nailed It!. Here are the guidelines we used for our competition.
The Baking and Cake Decorating Guidelines
- Bake and decorate an emoji cake.
- Use a box cake or make it from scratch, but contestant will receive bonus points for a cake completely from scratch.
- Contestant must make the buttercream, but they can use store bought fondant.
- Contestant must include a filling in your cake.
- Contestant has four hours from start to finish.
We had initially planned to make our cakes, frostings, and fillings in our own kitchens and then decorate and assemble together. However, one of our friends gave a super vague reason as to why she needed to do hers completely at home and just bring it over before dinner. Are you thinking we have a cheater on our hands? Because the rest of us all thought the same thing. We were convinced she was going to use way more than four hours, but we let it slide and agreed.
When she arrived for dinner, her cake was completely covered and she didn’t want to take it out until we finished dinner. We had all of our cakes lined up on the island ready for the judging. Finally, she lines all of us up in front of the island and reveals her secret cake. When she pulled the cover off, we all started screaming. Instead of making a fish emoji cake like she told us initially, she made the pregnant mommy emoji. She was pregnant! And not just pregnant, pregnant with TWINS that we would all later find out were actually TRIPLETS! Yes, TRIPLETS! This was such a fun surprise and made our night.
The Judging
Based on the super fun surprise pregnancy announcement, how could her cake not win?! It really was so great! But our husbands knowing all of us very well, decided to award each cake something special. But let’s be honest, pregnancy announcement cake trumps all other cakes! While I enjoyed all of the cakes, I was so proud of my unicorn cake! It was a four tiered white chocolate raspberry cake with white chocolate buttercream, a raspberry filling and a sprinkle center!
This was such a fun and inexpensive group activity and made for a great dinner party with oh so many yummy cakes! Have you had a baking or cooking competition? I would love to see your results! For more fun cake decorating ideas, check out my taco cake post!
