Jungle Animal Baby Shower Cake

I made this adorable jungle animal baby shower cake for one of my very good friends. She has always loved monkeys so it was no surprise that they decided to do a jungle theme for the nursery.

The cake is a two tiered cake frosting in light blue buttercream icing colors  to look like the sky. I used Wilton Delphinium Blue and Cornflower Blue to get the color just right. Next I used the Wilton Fondant and Gumpaste Jungle Mold to create the jungle animals (monkeys, elephants, giraffes and lions) as well as the clouds and trees out of fondant. I painted the details onto all the animals using powdered food coloring mixed with a little lemon extract and used a black edible marker to fill in the eyes.

Since this was a buttercream cake, and not a fondant covered cake, I decided not to use the mold to make the leaf border and instead used a tip #233 to pipe on sprigs of “grass” using green buttercream.

To make the clouds on top of the cake I just free form cut out white fondant. I let it dry a bit and then used blue edible marker to write the message “Welcome Little Monkey” on the three clouds.