SuperWhy! decorated cakes are not readily available in the grocery store bakeries, so a neighbor asked if I could make her 3 year old a SuperWhy! Birthday Cake. I happily agreed.
I got the SuperWhy! images (SuperWhy, The Balloons, and Why Writer) from the PBSKids website. They have a really cool design center page for Parents and teachers. You can basically get a coloring page for any PBS character you want out there. I used a 12×12 Square pan, and utilized the piping gel tracing method to transfer the images onto the cake. I know another decorator said it didn’t work well for her, but it worked just fine for me.
The balloons, SuperWhy, and the Why Writer were three separate images, so a good tip is to make sure you tape all three pics together, spaced the way you want them on the cake, and then do the piping gel trace as one big picture. It’s too hard to get them on the cake as separate pictures.
The frosting is just basic buttercream. I debated outlining everything in black, and decided not to. I outlined everything in the color I was going to use in that section, but it caused some problems in the body area (hard to see the arms vs. cap, body, etc.), so I suggest outlining at least the body in black.
I used tip #14 for main decoration. I used tip #17 for the hair, and it came out great. As far as colors go they were custom mixed. I used several different greens to obtain color shown, and same goes for the blue. One helpful tip is the skin color. I used Copper as usually suggested for skin tone, but it was too pale, so I added some brown to make it a little warmer. The bottom border was done in tip #21 and top border was done in tip #14. As can happen with any transfer project after the image was on the cake I had a lot of ’empty’ white space, especially to the left of SuperWhy!.
To fill in the white space I used sprinkles in the shape of stars and just lightly spread them out. It added a nice touch and went great with the theme, and most importantly it filled in the empty space. I do this a lot with my cakes. I keep sprinkles in all colors, shapes and sizes on hand for just this purpose. My neighbor was really pleased with it, and her son went crazy when he saw SuperWhy!, especially with the Why Writer in his hand. His smile was worth the work!! Happy Decorating!
I love this cake design, and in fact I just copied it almost exactly for my son’s 4th birthday (coincidentally, he’s named Adam too). What I didn’t realize until I started decorating was how many colors go on this cake! Light blue, dark blue, yellow, red, green flesh, brown, and white. Eight pastry bags! I spent more time mixing colors than I did actual decorating. But now that it’s over with, it was completely worth it. Thanks for the great design!