Cake Mama: Eloise's Woodland Wonderland

First of all, Eloise is adorable and I was absolutely excited to make her 2nd birthday cake. (Her first one was also made by me - Eloise's Ombre cake.) I wanted to make sure that her 2nd birthday cake was just as memorable.

So when I received this invitation in the mail, I was immediately inspired. I loved all of the little critters joining in the fun and knew I needed to incorporate them into the cake design. We just had to wait for the RSVPs to come in before I'd know the size of the cake.

In the meantime, I received an email message from a visitor to my site who wanted to know how I make those gum paste figures on the top of my cakes. My students also ask this question, so I thought there was no better way to teach this than to show you step-by-step how this is done. It's easy. But time consuming. You've been warned. ;)

So, the first thing I did was scan in the invitation and save it as a jpeg. I imported the picture into Word and cropped it so that I could print out the animals in the size I wanted. Here, they're just about 4" (or so) high. I had to crop three times to get all of the animals printed in the correct size. I used plain old printer paper for this.

The next step is cutting each of the little animals out.

Here are the supplies I needed to make these little critters. A scissors, a rolling pin, an exacto knife, gum paste, Crisco, food coloring in the colors you'll need and a nice work space.

I actually had some brown fondant on hand and mixed it with some gum paste. I used about a 50/50 mix of each. I spread some Crisco on my hands and knead the gum paste/fondant mix until it's really elastic and workable. Think about the consistency of silly puddy.

When it gets to a workable consistency, I spread some Crisco on my work surface and roll it out, about 1/4" thick.

I place the first animal on top and literally trace it out of the gum paste/fondant using my exacto knife.

Like this. This is my first layer and I'll build the monkey out of this.

I added more white gum paste to the brown to get this color and cut out the beaver the same way I did the monkey.

The monkey's belly also needed that lighter tan color so I cut that out of the monkey cut-out and traced it out of the lighter colored gum paste/fondant mix as well. If I need help figuring out were to place the cut-outs onto the shape, I just use the paper cut-out as the pattern, like I did below. Now his belly is where it's supposed to be.

With the varying shades of browns and tans, these little creatures are beginning to take shape. I use plain old water to stick all of the pieces together. A very light brushing of water truly acts as glue.

Now I'm working on the eyes.

More eyes...

I used a food marker (shown is a Wilton fine print food safe marker in brown) to draw in the detail work of the mouths and noses of some of the creatures.