Coolest Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Cake

I made this Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Cake for my son’s 1st birthday last January when there was big publicity for the Hungry Caterpillar story, celebrating it’s (40th?) anniversary. I still had some ready-made, ready-to-roll icing left over from the Christmas cake season, and used this to make the caterpillar.

The cake is a basic sponge cake with basic butter icing, coloured blue with food colouring. I made the caterpillar by making balls from the ready-to-roll icing to make each section of the caterpillar. I used water to dampen the balls on the areas where they were to join together, and arranged the caterpillar to appear as though it was munching through the cake.

The caterpillar’s colour was created by using a thin paintbrush to paint food colouring directly on the caterpillar’s body once it had been placed on the cake.

I arranged Bassett’s AllSorts (or supermarket’s own brand equivalent) all over the cake, just to add a bit more decoration and to make the face and legs of the caterpillar. I used broken bits of cocktail sticks to fix these onto the face (and made sure these were removed before consumed!).

Once complete I sieved icing sugar over everything just to hide any blemishes and add a bit of ‘sparkle’!

This cake was really easy to make because essentially it is just a basic sponge cake.