Coolest Very Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Cake

I made this Very Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Cake for a friend’s son’s 1st birthday. I got most of my ideas for it from other submissions on this site! It wasn’t too difficult, but it was fairly time-consuming.

The leaf was hand-carved out of a large sheet cake, then covered in two different colors of fondant. The caterpillar was carved out of a bundt cake and extra cake left over from carving the leaf (which is why his head is kind of saggy… I didn’t want to make another entire cake just for his head – but in retrospect, I wish I had).

The feet and facial features are all just molded out of fondant. For the caterpillar, I just made 5 different greenish shades of fondant (using several different green food coloring colors, a blue, and a yellow), then rolled them out one at a time and overlapped them slightly. I was going to use colored toothpicks for the fuzz on the top of the caterpillar in the book, but I decided against it, since it’s for a little kid, and I didn’t want his mom to have to pull 100 toothpicks out of the cake before they could eat it.

I also made the cake board out of some cardboard and construction paper. I covered it all with clear contact paper – it makes it really easy to wipe up any icing mistakes along the way!