Awesome 3D Care Bears Cake

For those that haven’t seen my other cakes, I’m an Australian Dad who makes his children their birthday cakes. I have no training at all and am just self-taught. We have 2 boys and last year we had our beautiful baby girl enter our family and she recently celebrated her first birthday. Normally the kids pick their cake theme and give Dad the task of making it happen. However, for 1st birthday parties, we select the theme as the babies have a fairly simple vocabulary at that age. So I left the theme selection in the hands of my wife and she selected Care Bears for our daughter. Originally, I was only going to make 1 Care Bear, then a week out from the party, my loving wife thought she would give her husband a challenge and upped it to two Care Bears. I turned down a 3D bear cake tin that my local cake supply store was trying to hire out to me, as it didn’t look much like a care bear and I prefer to carve anyway.

So after a bit of an internet search, I’m a full bottle on Care Bears. I had a few stuffed toys to work with for measurements, although I had to scale them down a little. I used layers of butter cake separated by white chocolate ganache. I went to work carving it, and I’ll add that this was probably my least prepared effort yet. Normally I’ve got templates that I use to carve, but this one was just a case of look at the fluffy toy bears and look at the cake and just cut the necessary pieces off. Once cut, I covered everything in white chocolate ganache for taste and for a smooth working surface.

I rolled some fondant for the details like the eyes and tummies and used good quality food colouring diluted with vodka to paint the details. I then coloured and rolled the fondant for the base and applied this around the bears.

Next came the most painful part of all – Applying the fur. I recently used ganache to cover a 3D R2-D2 cake for my eldest son. I won’t post that cake, as even though I am more than happy with the result, I essentially just followed a professional cake maker’s instructions from the internet, so I feel I cheated a little there and won’t claim any glory. Anyway, I learnt a bit about ganache from the R2-D2 cake and thought – I can pipe coloured chocolate ganache for the fur… Easy… Right? … Wrong! It is possible to pipe ganache, but as a first timer, the consistency and temperature can not be underestimated. I am happy with the result, but started stressing late at night with no experience piping ganache. The ganache piping started fine, but soon trouble struck when my hands would warm it up in the piping bag and it would come out as a blob. I juggled between the fridge and a 2 second zap in the microwave, constantly emptying and refilling the piping bag. I used the grass applicator nozzle for the fur by the way – I’ve never done this kind of thing before. The bears turned out a little tatty looking, but I think it is part of their charm. While they don’t strictly resemble care bears, they turned out like teddy bears and are recognizable by their colours and tummy images. I took a lot of inspiration for the decoration of the base from another cake I found on the internet – so if that person ever stumbles across my cake and thinks the base looks familiar, I just want to say thankyou.

Everyone liked the cake. I’m awaiting my daughter’s cake next year, when she can select the theme herself.

Thanks

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