Birthday Cake: Monkey Faces

For Logan's party we chose to do a Jungle Theme since 90% of his baby stuff is covered with monkeys. Renae had so much on her plate already with getting things together and organizing all sorts of stuff that I told her I would take on a portion of the food and the the birthday cake. Of course I was going to take pictures so that I could blog about these things.

So after a few days of browsing the internet I found some ideas that I thought I might be able to replicate. I chose to make a vanilla bean cake with chocolate and peanut butter icing. An idea that I thought was awesome was to have a larger cake to serve from and a smaller "smash" cake for Logan. Because I doubled the batch we had enough to make both cakes and an additional 18 cupcakes.

While I'm mentioning cakes and baking...a friend of mine from work has started blogging about her passion for baking and I was WOWed by some of her awesome designs. Check out her blog Reese's Cakes By Design (Cakes, Cupcakes, and More) and check out her cupcakes (especially the helicopter ones!!!!)

Here is how I "built" the cake. It was a long process all in all, I guess I started around 7:30 and went to bed just before midnight. Enjoy!

These were the two larger rounds that I used for the serving cake. Probably like a 9 inch and a 6 or 7 inch round.

Here are the smaller rounds as well as the 18 cupcakes.

MMMMM

The icing was almost a fail! The peanut butter icing was a cinch. But the chocolate peanut butter actually started out as vanilla frosting. I tried to make brown with food coloring and ended up with a rich pink color. Luckily, we had cocoa powder in the pantry, and so I loaded up on that until it was dark brown.

Now that they were all cooled, it was time to start the transformation from rounds to monkeys.

I started with the smash cake...that way if I messed up, I could avoid it later on the larger cake.

I decided to do all of the peanut butter icing at once. So far there were no real issues with the cakes, except for making some minor adjustments on the cutting of the larger monkey's ears.

Then I added the chocolate icing to the larger monkey.

Then I filled in his eyes with a whipped vanilla icing.

Then I finished off the little monkey.

They were almost done, they just needed a little extra icing to bring them to life and give them expression.

The larger cake.

The smaller cake.

Ta da! There are all done and ready to go into the fridge for the night. Not too bad for someone who has never done anything like this before.