I remember my mum making a swimming pool cake for my brother from the Women’s Weekly Birthday cake book. It had jelly in the middle and little people floating around in lolly tubes. I dragged the vintage 70s book out and used the same choccie biscuit structure as the swimming pool and just made up the rest.

Ingredients.

• 2 x packets of cake mix with icing mixture included
  (I used White Wings White Chocolate Rasberry Swirl)
• 2 x 250g packets of chocolate finger biscuits
• 2 x 250g packets of cream cheese
• 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa
• blue food colouring
• rubber ducks to decorate
• white mini marshmallows

Instructions.

Get the cream cheese out of the fridge

It needs to come to room temperature for the icing.
You might want to pre-heat the oven as well.

Bake both cakes

Just follow the packet directions and pour into a round 23cm tin. I lowered the temperature of the oven by 10degrees and baked for a little longer than the packet recommended. This helps to stop the cake rising too much – you’ll want a flat top later.

Make Icing

Make icing in two separate batches as you’ll need pretty much equal parts brown and blue coloured icing. Mix according to directions on pack then add 250g of the cream cheese to the icing and beat it for a couple more minutes.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa to one of the icing batches to make it a chocolatey brown. It can be as dark and rich or as light as you like.

Add blue food colouring, one drop at a time, to the other batch until you have reach a colour strong enough to look fun but not too scary to eat!

Slice the top off

Slice the top off each of the cooled cakes so that you have a flat area to work with.

Assemble cakes

Put one cake down flat on the board or dish you want to serve on. Smooth some of the chocolate icing over the top and place the other cake on top.

Make the tub

Ice all around the edges of the cake leaving the top bare. Next start placing chocolate sticks around the side. My cakes were a little tall so I placed a row of chocolate sticks at the base as well to give them some more height.

Blue icing on top

Smooth the blue icing over the top of the cake being careful not to have it merge too much into the chocolate icing on the sides.Use a knife to create little wave peaks.

Rub-a-dub-dub…

…put the ducks in the tub! Place the duckies around the top then add little marshmallows around the blue icing peaks for bubbles.I got a bit carried away and put some icing down the side, pooling at the bottom to look like water and bubbles had spilled over the side of the tub.

Viola!