Sean’s Jungle Cake

July 2010

This past week I worked on a cake for Carrie, a fellow Nestie. Her little boy’s first birthday party was this weekend and they needed a cake for the occasion. Carrie chose yellow cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream icing. She also asked for a jungle theme.

As I usually do, I made the fondant decorations several days ahead. I had never made fondant animals before, but I gave it a go. I am NO artist (that’s for sure!) but I found a couple of examples on the Interwebs and I tried to mimic what I saw. Below on the left is my inspiration photo (source) for the lion, and on the right is the lion I created.

For the monkey, I only looked at a few different inspiration pictures, but the one below on the left (source) was the main one. My monkey creation is on the right.

I also made a palm tree. I’ve made a palm tree before, but that time I used royal icing for the leaves instead of fondant. I thought the fondant leaves turned out well, but I wasn’t too happy with the shape of the tree. I think I should have used royal icing for glue/stability instead of just fondant and water.

Also a few days ahead, I made up the strawberry filling using the same recipe I used to make raspberry filling a couple weeks ago. I just replaced the raspberries with strawberries and it came out very well.

For the cake, I made 1 1/2 batches of Wilton’s yellow cake (my go-to) and filled 2 10″ round cake pans. I made 2 batches of Wilton’s buttercream and tinted it green using Leaf Green gel.

I filled and frosted the cake and then added some more color to the remaining icing to make a darker green. I used a multi-opening tip to pipe “grass” around the edges for a border. I added the fondant decorations (including fondant letters for the inscription) and Sean’s cake was complete!