Cute Homemade Baby Einstein Caterpillar Cake Made with Wilton Sports Ball Pan

This Baby Einstein Caterpillar Cake is the first cake I’ve ever made on request for someone other than friends or family. This baby Einstein caterpillar cake was made for 1 year old Cole. I made it with 3 different cake mixes (white, chocolate, strawberry) where each box of standard, buy at the grocery store, cake mix was used to make 2 half circles using the Wilton Sports Ball cake pans. Each cake (2 bumps) took about 50 minutes to bake at 325 in my oven.

After baking, I cooled each half circle before cutting off the bottom to level. Then I iced each one in a base coat of thinned icing in the same color as the textured stars that would be applied later. This helped keep cake surface from showing through any gaps.

The caterpillar took 5 bumps and the 6th half cake was decorated in leftover icing as a baby’s first cake.

The icing was homemade buttercream that I thinned with 1 TBS water to make piping stars with a bag easier. I dyed the icing with Wilton gel dye (Cole’s mom asked that I use red, orange, green, and blue) and used a #21 star tip to apply the texture.

For the feet I baked 4 mini muffins and the tail was a small cake baked in a souffle dish that I cut down. The antenna are pipe cleaners, the eyes and mouth black cake deco gel, and the cheeks pink sprinkles. The white spots on the eyes are thumb tacks (I considered using Mentos, but they were a bit to large for my eyes).

The letters I cut out with my scrapbooking dye cutter and applied to plastic, colored toothpicks using a hot glue gun. I made the cake board from cut out cardboard that I measured before the cakes were baked, wrapped in foil, wrapping in color cellophane wrapping.

Total time: about 4 hours baking, about 3 hours icing.