Jungle Cake

Last year, I got to make a Minnie Mouse cake to celebrate Chloe's first birthday. This year, her mummy contacted me again to help make a jungle-themed cake for her second birthday! She and her guests really loved the Devil's food cake with whipped dark chocolate ganache and requested for it again for this cake. 

Jungle Cake*

Chloe's mummy wanted to use the birthday kid's favourite jungle toys to top the cake with, so she asked me to sketch up a jungle cake for the animals to "live" on. The bottom tier of the cake is sky blue, bordered with green foliage and decorated with some hanging jungle vines. The upper tier of the cake will be like a tree trunk, with a grassy green top.

Chloe's jungle animal toy collection

Jungle cake sketch

I love the challenge of bringing a cake from a sketch to reality! I tweaked the bottom tier of the cake to make it more whimsical,  adding 2D tree cutouts, draping vines and a hand cut grassy edge to border the cake. The leaves for the vines would have been a pain to cut if I had to do them individually! So I came up with a better and way easier method: I used a medium-sized daisy plunger cutter to cut flowers from different shades of green fondant, and then just plucked the petals off, shaping the ends quickly into points! Boom, perfect leaves for the jungle vine!

a closer look at the bottom tier

I used cloud cutters for the trees and hand-cut the trunks. For the grass border, I rolled a long green strip of fondant out, used an impression roller to give it vertical stripes, and then hand-cut the blades of grass with a sharp knife. I added a lighter shade of green "daisies" cut in half around the grass to give it more depth. I used a woodgrain impression and letter stamps for the Happy Birthday sign in front.

the little details

For the top tier of the cake, I used the fondant wrap & lid method, with brown chocolate fondant for the wrap, and green for the lid. I used a veiner tool to draw a wood grain pattern onto the fondant to make it look like a tree trunk. 

For the jungle leaves scattered around the cake, I used various sizes of leaf plunger cutters, but didn't press in the leaf pattern onto the cutouts. Instead, I used the back of a knife to indent the central vein, and then cut notches on the edges of the leaves, bending them into shape to give them some movement. 

view from the back

I really love how the cake came out (and it goes so well on the wooden stand that my friend got me last Christmas!) It's the perfect cake jungle for all of Chloe's jungle animal toys to live on to celebrate her second birthday! 

Jungle Cake

Here's the finished cake with Chloe's toy toppers on it! Her daddy decided to have the lion on top instead of the giraffe, but it looks just as good. Many thanks to Chloe's mummy for sharing the birthday pics. Love the animal print birthday banner that she made too! Happy 2nd Birthday, sweet Chloe!

Happy 2nd Birthday Chloe!*
(*pic courtesy of Chloe's mummy)