Jungle Cake

This cake is from my "archives", ie, before I had this blog.  I made it a couple of years ago for a 4 year old's birthday when green was the order of the day.

She selected her cake from my trusty Woman's Weekly cake decorating book and I did use quite a few of the ideas from it.

I started with the template for the jungle leaves and made loads of them from ready to roll royal icing. I invested in some new paste colour, Spruce Green, and it came out much better than my liquid colour.  I'm going to go with paste from now on.  When I got bored with cutting out all the little sections from the leaf template, I just freehanded my own leaf design.  Before they dried, I scored a blunt knife down the centre to look like a vein.

I was very fortunate that we had bought a new fridge the week before and the old one was standing, unplugged in my kitchen. Aside from being a huge eyesore, it was extremely convenient as a set of shelves for storing all those leaves as they dried. I really don't know where else I might have put them to dry.

The leaves were the most tedious part, the rest was pretty simple.  I used loads of cake mixes, some chocolate, some vanilla, to make the base slab; covered it with spruce green buttercream icing; made a blue watering hole out of a scrap of royal icing; and then started layering all those leaves.  I added some jelly snakes through the layers and the kids loved them.

I added some sections of Flake chocolate bars around the sides of the cake to look like tree trunks and I used crushed honeycomb pieces for the banks of the watering hole.  I cheated on the jungle animals and just used (washed) plastic toy animals.  I found the cute jungle candles at Party Pieces.

The four year olds loved the cake, they were grabbing at it before I even lit the candles. Before I served the cake, they wanted to play with it and the animals got smooshed around in the watering hole!  Little horrors!