The Bunny Cake

My older brother called and asked if I could make a cake his girlfriend's birthday party. One of her friends was going to celebrate a birthday around the same time. One of the girls likes bunny rabbits and the other likes butterflies. I don't remember which one likes which. But that's okay. Neither one is my girlfriend.



So I saw this cake online that had little rabbits, butterflies, flowers, and a rainbow and so I decided to use that design as my inspiration. I started out by making the rainbow, flowers, and butterflies out of gum paste. The rainbow was pretty straight-forward. Roll up logs of different colors and arch them like a rainbow. Done. The butterflies were pretty straight-forward, too. I found a butterfly cookie cutter. The real trick with them was to get them to look less flat. To do this, I built a contraption out of a cut up cereal box, some wax paper, and a gum paste sculpting tool. It looked like this:

To make the flowers, I used two different sized cutters and some toothpicks. Like this:

The next part was the bunnies. For these, I chose modelling chocolate. This is a new medium for me. But I found out that I really like working with modelling chocolate. I'm going to make it again for other projects. To make the modelling chocolate, I melted 8 oz of white chocolate and mixed in 3.5 tablespoons of light corn syrup. Pour it out on to a couple of layers of plastic wrap, let it cool, and then cover and wrap. After letting it sit for a day, it's ready to work. Then it was just a matter of modelling the shape. It's hard to describe the methodology for modelling rabbits. I just kinda did what seemed right at the time. The faces are painted on with edible coloring.

Here is the final cake. I trimmed it with yellow ribbon to hide the imperfections along the borders. The cake is covered in fondant. The clouds are left-over modelling chocolate.