Whimsical Woodland Birthday Cake

The Story behind this Cake

I created this cake for my husband and daughter who shared a birthday.
I chose pastel pink and blue as my main colour theme, adding woodland animals and trees to give the cake a whimsical, dramatic impact. 
The animals were hand made from gumpaste dusted with shimmer powder and the trees were dark chocolate. 

The pink cake was vanilla rose and the blue cake was a moist hummingbird cake. Both cakes were finished with a white chocolate cream cheese frosting. 

Mama Bears Kitchen has shared her decorating tips:

I was surprised how easy the gumpaste was to work with and am keen to explore further uses of it in creating templates. I found  suitable templates on the internet (by just googling "deer/bear template" etc) and placed them over the rolled gumpaste, which was 1/4 inch thick. I cut through ordinary copy paper with a very sharp craft knife. 
In hindsight, I would have made an outline of the image with the knife then removed the paper to get a finer line with the knife. I will do this next time. I also chose templates that had thick lines and weren't too detailed.
  
For the deer topper I added a base line at the bottom of the image to keep it sturdy and pushed toothpicks up into the deer legs to be inserted into the cake when it was dry and hard. With the other images I simply pressed them onto the side of the cake soon after I had iced it. 

The chocolate trees proved a little trickier, mainly because of our warm winter weather here. I simply melted dark chocolate and put it into a small zip lock bag, snipping a tiny hole in the corner when I was ready to begin. 
My drawing skills aren't the greatest, so I just 'drew' each tree freehand with the melted chocolate straight onto baking paper on a flat cookie tray. This was pretty easy to do, however they needed to be refrigerated immediately. I assembled the trees onto the cake while the icing was still soft. 

This cake was kept in the fridge for about 24 hours before I photographed it. As soon as I took it out of the fridge, one of the trees began to melt.
 When 'drawing' the trees onto paper, make sure you give them a thick trunk and don't make the branches too spindly. If you live in a colder climate, you may have no problem with melting trees!(and could do them taller, so they reach the height of both tiers of cake.

I was really pleased with the overall look of this cake. It would be perfect for a gender neutral baby shower or birthday of any age. It was quite easy to make and could be adapted to suit many different themes.

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