Get Your Craft On: Birch Tree, Teepee, Forrest Animal Cake Creation

Before I begin, let me first say how we honestly had very little idea of how this cake was going to play out before we started. We had a general concept in mind, but it was very rough as we worked out way through it. I cannot tell you how freaking excited I am about this final product of this cake! It may just be one of my very favorites! Here is the creative process.

We made three 10' round cakes and three 8 1/2' round cakes. We froze them over night so they are easier to dirty ice and cut out a piece of cardboard both at 10" round and 8 1/2" round.

Then we leveled off the tops of the cakes.

Stuck the three layers together and trimmed off the excess around the three to get that nice smooth straight edge. Then we dirty iced the cake getting ready for the fondant.

The fondant master at work!

Soooo beautiful. After all this time we still forget to leave an extra 1/2 inch when cutting around the edge to allow for a bit of shrinkage. Now that I've written it down we should remember ;)

Then we took some Wiltons food coloring (it's very thick and more of a paste) and started to water it down a bit to get the right consistency to paint on the cake. This was our first time painting on a cake so we were really just going by feel!

To get the lines around the cake there is a very fancy tool you can use, but since I didn't have one I cut up a few pieces of the cake boxes like pictured above to get the look we wanted.

I dipped the tips of the triangles into the food coloring and I drug it around the cake. The messier and choppier the better.

This is all by feel so be prepared to have some mistakes. That's what the back of the cake is for right?

Then I painted on some spots, trying to harness my inner tree!

While I did that Mom painted the top of the cake to look like wood and I added a black line around the outside edge to really crisp it up.

Repeat the same process for the top layer.

Then we added skewers to help hold up the top layer. We cut them down to to same height as the top of the cake.

Time to add the top!!

I then made up some teepee's out of fondant and stuck them to the front of the cake. The tooth pick poles out the top really add that extra little something!

For the top of the cake we made some fondant mushrooms and a teepee. We also added a racoon and a fox which I had made out of clay previously. For things like the animals I find fondant doesn't always stick and sit just right and it makes me nervous to have things not work the day of the party. Clay while not edible gives you that same look, without all of the risk. Then we added some chocolate rocks for the camp fire.