Where the Wild Things Are

Getting Started

Pinterest and Google Images have changed the landscape of cake design. In years past when a customer emailed or called to order a cake, usually it would start with a theme. Most of the time I had free reign to figure out the direction of the cake. This was great FUN and sometimes extremely challenging! In fact, in the first several years of cake designing, I copied only one cake - a Martha Stewart teapot cake.

Now, most of the time I receive multiple pictures from Pinterest or screen shots from Google Images. It is a completely different type of challenge while still being A LOT of FUN!

This spring, I was asked to bake a Where the Wild Things Are cake for a first birthday. The cake would be tiered and it was to be based on a combination of different cakes. It was a smaller cake then either of the inspiration cakes, because the party was a small gathering for the birthday boy. The mother of the birthday boy sent me several pictures of cakes and we chose two to combine for inspiration. We'd also have cookie favors to go with the cake copied from a picture. I was excited to make the cake and based on the screen shot I found the blog post describing how to make what would be the top tier of  my cake. I drew a sketch based on the inspiration pictures. After the sketch, we made some changes; I dropped the ribbon on the bottom from the final cake, changing it to a beaded fondant border and we decided to move the 1 to the crown.

The Cookies!

I absolutely LOVED making the cookies. It is fun to work from a picture, play with Royal Icing and fondant and make beautiful cookies. I really appreciated having the picture to work from for the Wild Things cookies. Thanks to Nikkiikkin.com for the inspiration.

For the cake with bark, I found the tutorial challenging. I'm not the most patient person and don't work with chocolate too frequently, but still I was reasonably confident that I could follow the directions in the post. The chocolate was challenging. Looking back, I think I made my layer of chocolate too thick because as soon as I started to roll the parchment like the photo tutorial showed, it cracked oddly (mostly into smithereens or big chunks) and I realized I'd need to recruit the help of a knife! I purposefully cut the bark into "bark-like pieces" and then placed them on the cake. Then, I used the melted chocolate to paint the cake to fill in the pieces. I poured the remaining chocolate on the top of the cake and spread it around roughly. However, it did turn out beautifully. Thank you to Sugarhero.com for the detailed photo tutorial for the bark.

The Finishing Touches!

This entire cake was for Beau and his guests for his first birthday party. His mom asked if I could make the two little monsters on the front of one of the inspiration cakes. I didn't include them in the design but I did think that I could do it. However, when the time came to make them, I wasn't reasonably sure that they'd add to the cake instead of detracting. They felt a little out of my comfort range for doing them in a lovely way, and I was worried that if they were poorly executed they'd detract from the cake's look. Luckily Beau's mom was super understanding, and we had the great monster cookies for our Wild Thing component.