We decided that our son’s 1st birthday party would be a safari theme. There are many different cakes that can be created for this theme but my husband came up with something a little different. We wanted a special occasion cake for our first birthday.
Safaris are taken in Africa so we chose to make the large cake in the shape of Africa. We baked three sheet cakes and used a picture of the continent to determine the best shape. We even created Madagascar as our son’s individual cake. We used graham cracker crumbs to create the desert, Hershey kisses for the mountains and green sprinkles for the fertile land surrounding the Nile River. We used green icing and a Pampered Chef tool to create the rippled look of the green land and blue icing for the water areas.
For Madagascar we used a leaf tip to make long strings of grass. We even placed the cake on cardboard covered with blue plastic wrap for the ocean. We topped the cake with trees and animals bought from a local party store.
More Map-Shaped Special Occassion Cakes
Cake by Tiffany B., Laplace, LA
I made this special occasion cake for the bicentennial of St. John the Baptist parish in Louisiana. I baked four cakes and cut out the shape of Louisiana. It’s just a basic white cake, the layers have white icing in the middle and the icing is fondant with butter cream under it.
Then I used a stencil with stars and swirls and airbrushed it on the fondant. Everything on the cake is hand made out of fondant. I used tooth-picks to do the fine detailing on it and painted them with food coloring.
The grass and the water is coconut that I colored with food coloring and airbrushing. I put the coconut in a zip lock and shook it up with the food coloring in it and then sprayed some airbrushing into the bag. The 200 is sugar cookies. I used sugar cookie icing, airbrushed the stencil on it and then outlined it with gel icing.
Then I took curled wire and stuck it behind the 200 and bought some fluorescent plastic zip ties, cut the tips off of them and stuck them behind the 200. It took me about 10 hours all together to make the cake.
