Every year my son and I make a new cake for his birthday. This is the only time I bake, and each year I visit coolest birthday cakes to help generate ideas! This year my son wanted a volcano birthday cake. I found a lot of ideas here and on other sites. My favorite was one made from rice crispy treats.
Everything on this cake is edible with the exception of the dinosaurs! Our cake base is both chocolate and yellow cake and pored into the oversized baking pan at the same time so we can serve the kids their choice of cake. Always a big hit with the kids that they get a choice.
The icing is butter cream and the top of the cake is covered in marshmallow fondant colored green preferably with gel food coloring. For kids cakes marshmallow fondant taste so much better that its worth making even if it has a slightly less professional look! Using a food processor crush graham crackers for the beach then pipe waves around the island.
We formed the volcano out of rice crispy treats and we put a glass in the top so we could put dry ice and water to make the volcano erupt. This was my son’s favorite part of helping with the cake. Once we had it shaped we rolled colored marsh mellow fondant and covered the rice crispy volcano. Using our pumpkin carving tools we gave the volcano crevasse and texture, then painted it with gel food coloring. I think we were both covered in food coloring at this point.
The trees are chocolate and Pirouette cookies. Melt chocolate and use a piping bag to make palms then let harden in the freezer. Roll more melted chocolate in sugar to make coconuts. Stand the pirouette rolled cookies in holes cut into a box top. To assemble the trees used more melted chocolate to “glue” the coconuts and palms to the tops of the cookies. It’s helpful to make the holes in the cake for the trees before putting the trees in the cake. I crushed one of the fragel cookie trees trying to get it through the fondant into the cake.
The kids all loved the cake and my son who helped make it was particularly proud of his creation. One note, if you are going to use dry ice and water to make smoke practice it in advance. Our eruption didn’t work quite as well as we had hoped J However, the 8 year old boys still thought it was really cool!
I’m grateful for this site and happy to share our take on other creations found here!
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