Coolest Jungle Birthday Cake

I have tried making this kind of jungle cake a few times, it is a copy of another one I saw online. I took some of the ideas and changed things a little. This cake took a very long time especially with all the little animals made out of gum paste, at least an hour each on average. For the grass on this cake I had discovered the use of a garlic press instead of my children’s play dough kit. Much easier!

The little tiger took so long on this cake, trying to get the little stripes onto him was really tricky especially as using any intense black icing, the dye will start to come out, so you need to place the stripes exactly in place and then leave them or they start to stain the rest of the tigers skin. On the other jungle cakes I made I even went to the lengths of rolling the little white foam bubbles at the base of the waterfall out of fondant before I discovered that the sugar pearl sprinkles are perfect for the foam and much less time consuming. I think I did get a bit carried away with all the grass and the flowers but I did like the end result.

Another idea I picked up from other cakes I see online is to make the candle base part of the cake, in the instance I put them into tufts of grass.