I was on vacation when I received an email from one of my customers. She said her daughter would be celebrating her birthday at Cayuga Nature Center and that she loves porcupines. She was hoping to have a cake with a North American porcupine look/theme. Okay ... how shall I do this? My mind started turning and I spent some time looking for pictures. A search for "North American porcupine" generated these results. A 2D drawn version of a porcupine might end up looking messy. It'd be better to go with a less realistic look but still get the porcupine feel for this porcupine cake. The customer said she'd love a porcupine cake and cupcakes with porcupine cupcake toppers! It was time to start honing the details.

Porcupine Preparation

The porcupine cupcake toppers and cake ruminated in my head for our vacation, along with all the other cake designs I had coming up. I didn't want to totally copy_something, but I did want to be inspired by something. I sent an email with screen shots to my husband, noting the attributes that I liked from each picture and asked his opinion. I liked the combo of the 3D and 2D toppers that others had made, and I liked the “perfectness” of them!

My Husband’s Reply

Instead of emailing, he popped over into my home bakery. My bakery is right across from his office with a little connecting area between them. He liked the flat one with ruffly quills the best for the cupcake toppers for the same reason that I did. It is flat and it looked very repeatable. He liked the first little toppers the best for the top of the cake because they were most similar to the flat version of the toppers. I could get behind that. After all, I liked aspects of each choice. Now the job was to make them unique to me!