Woodland Animals Cake

I made this woodland birthday cake a while ago for my daughter’s 7th birthday. She absolutely adores animals and nature so the forest theme suited her perfectly.

She loves planning and baking with me so the whole birthday planning process was a dream come true for her. I kept a few small surprises for her but I always let my kids plan with me because they come up with the most interesting ideas and in reality what I come up with always ends up being much more work. So why not keep it simple and let them plan?

The first thing she decided on was a black forest cake. For the purpose of decorating, it’s not a very traditional black forest cake but it does contain the most important elements – chocolate and cherry.

I think this theme would suit kids of many ages, so I figured I’d share a bit of a tutorial on how I made it in case you’re interested. I posted the process on my insta stories, and thought I would share those photos with a bit more in-depth explanation here.

First up: I chose to make a three layer cake rather than a two layer cake as this adds height, giving the cake a more dramatic and impressive look. This is the cake recipe I used.

Tip: if you only have two pans, pre-measure the batter, splitting it into three. That way you know the third layer will bake up the same as the others.

Next, I made a batch of cherry pie filling to put in the centre. Next time I think I would add a layer of ganache as well to give it that extra oomph of flavour (you can never have too much chocolate in my book!).

I made only this one small batch of buttercream which was just enough for the whole cake, as I only used it as a dam for the filling and to thinly frost the outside. That is the bonus of naked cakes – less frosting! I know I’m not the only one who scrapes the frosting off when eating cake. This way you just scrape it off from the start. 😉

I made all of these items the day before so that I only had to assemble on the day of the party. You’ll need to refrigerate the cherry pie filling, but the cake and frosting can just be covered in plastic wrap and left at room temperature.

I made these animals the night before as well. I used marzipan but you can use fondant or gumpaste as well. I followed these tutorials from Cake Dutchess on Youtube:

• Fox
• Fawn
• Raccoon

On the day of, it’s time to assemble. First make a dam with frosting on each layer where you will put the cherry pie filling. Simply pipe it around the edge with a large piping tip and then fill it with half of the cherry pie filling, repeat with the next layer.

The birthday girl wanted to help with the frosting so I piled some on top for her to spread, then I made sure to take it down the sides once she was done. Remember, since this is a rustic cake you want to make sure that the chocolate cake peeks through the sides.

To decorate we used these really awesome cinnamon sticks that we found and placed them around as wood and logs. We also used some rosemary sprigs for trees and crumbled some chocolate cookies on top for dirt.

It was a really fun cake to make and if you used toy animals instead of making them yourself, I’d say it’s got to be one of the easiest birthday cakes you could make!

If you have any questions let me know below!