Cool African Jungle Safari Birthday Cake

The story…

Leading up to my daughters first birthday it wasn’t a difficult decision on the theme we wanted, mummy is Australian and daddy is Tanzanian, and because we are living in Oz it was going to be an African theme… and there’s nothing better than an African safari =)

So came the fun task of finding just the right cake, these fancy cakes are quite a new experience for me, I’ve never attempted something so ambitious, it called for the expert help of my sister, who, having 6 kids has made many fancy birthday cakes… So with computer in hand I searched the net for just the right cake for my gorgeous little one year old…

I got ideas from a number of cakes and now it was time to make my creation… The cake itself was made from scratch and I was going for a zebra style so I made a marble cake, but instead of chocolate and vanilla, I put some pink food colouring in the vanilla so it was a pink and chocolate zebra cake, I had absolutely no idea how it looked so all I could do was hope it was ok… With the cake in the freezer it was time to relax (lol or stress) until decorating time…

It was a Saturday morning here in Canberra and first things first we were heading out to the hot air baloon festival, awake at 4am the day of decorating probably not the smartest idea =)

After the baloons we headed home to make a start on the cake… I had two square cakes, the largest cake was iced with a pink butter icing, and using black fondant we made zebra stripes incorporating my daughters name… The smaller cake sat ontop as a layered cake, it was iced abound the edges with yellow icing and instead of using fondant i used chocolate easter eggs to make giraffe skin patterns, the top of the cake was iced green to represent grass…

Now came the hardest part and what I was stressing about… How were these animals going to turn out, I thought I would be running to the nearest shop to try finding plastic animals… Starting with the elephant we coloured the fondant grey, finding a cute picture on the net it was time to start, how surprised was I when it looked pretty awesome, rolling out balls for the head and body, making a sausage shape for the trunk and the legs and black fondant was used for the eyes and a little pink for the ears, to make the wrinkley bits we used a skewer to indent the fondant, we stuck it all together with a little water… The lion was next using yellow fondant, and then some brown for the mane the hardest part was working out how to attach the mane, we made a circle drew “fur” with a skewer and sat it on the body then put the head on and wrapped the mane around the head, I was amazed at how good it looked… The giraffe was next using the yellow fondant, the shaping was slightly different and making the neck was the challenge because the head was rather heavy… Brown fondant was used for the “skin” and I put a little pink food colouring on the cheeks for the “glowing” effect… The trees were the hardest to make, we wrapped brown fondant around a couple of skewers which was easy enough, but the leaves were not so easy, I’m not sure how it finally worked, but it was after many attemps… We put a party hat on each of the animals for that “birthday effect”…

Then we placed the animals on the cake, although the giraffe needed a little extra support until it had set, so I used a skewer to hold the back straight… the trees were arranged, I made a 1 out of fondant and then we piped around the edges and voila… One very awesome birthday cake for my one year old birthday princess, I could not hide my excitement on how good this cake looked, I was so proud, but couldn’t have done it without the advise and cake making skills and experience of my wonderful sister =) … Can you believe it took us six and half hours to make and it was all done with two babies and a four year old running around the kitchen and under our feet =/

The following day was party day… With the table set, jungle food prepared and the cake the centre piece, the guests started arriving, how wonderful did I feel when people thought that the cake was professionally made and the surprise on their face when I said “no it’s homemade”… It was a perfect day, the only problem was cutting that beautiful cake =) oh and by the way the marble cake was delicious… yummo…

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