Coolest Monsters Inc Birthday Cake

A friend asked me to do a Monsters Inc Birthday Cake for her son’s second birthday. I had a look around on the net, but wasn’t keen on any that I saw, but saw some lovely ideas for little decorations that I decided to have a go at.

As I’m not the best cake baker, I got 5 slabs of ready iced and creamed Madeira cake from Asda and turned it upside down on the cake board to get a flat surface. I put jam in between the slabs to ‘glue’ them together.

I bought some paper wrapped wires from the cake shop and I cut out, using cutters, some stars and molded some number 2’s. I dipped one end of the wire in icing glue (Gum Arabic) then carefully twisted the wire up through the bottom of the pieces and left them flat to dry. I cut out strips of coloured icing and wrapped it around a knitting needle to get curly ‘streamers’.

Once I had all my pieces made, I left them all to dry for a couple of days. When the pieces were dry, I carefully twisted the curly bits from the knitting needle to remove them and I made some royal icing to fix some wires to them too.

I had no idea where to start with the molding of the figures and agonized for days, trying to find ideas, but couldn’t find any I was happy with.

I eventually molded the figures of Boo and Mike out of fondant icing, using a printed picture from Google to help me match colours and shapes. I really struggled with these characters and found Boo in her monster suit far easier to do than Boo in her long pink T shirt. The circular markings on the outfit were made with a clean casing from a Biro pen and was then painted over with silver petal dust and a touch of water.

The mop on her head was made from 3 small rectangular pieces that were slit to make fringing, then layered over the top of each other. The main body was made from a stumpy sausage shape then covered over with the pieces for the monster suit.

The main shape for Mike was easy, but then I hollowed out a shape to sink the eye and made a slit and hollowed out a mouth leaving flaps to make ‘lips’ to pull over the teeth, so it looked like he had a proper mouth. The arms and legs were quite easy, but a little fiddly around the fingers and claws.

The cake base was made in the colours of Sully with different sized circles attached with gum Arabic.

This is one of the most frustrating cakes I have ever made, but I think it turned out well in the end and I’m glad I didn’t give up!