Coolest Caterpillar Garden Birthday Cake 37

by Adrienne
(Salt Lake City, UT)

Homemade Caterpillar Garden Birthday Cake

This Caterpillar Garden Birthday Cake was my daughter's first birthday cake. I got the idea for the caterpillar from this website (thanks to all of you) but everything else was my own creation. I used a sheet cake for the base, frosted green, with grassy accents (using the Wilton grass tip).

I used the Wilton miniball pan for the caterpillar's body segments. When I set the head on top of the front body segment, I had some crushing issues. I ended up fixing it but it would have been a lot smarter to just provide adequate support from the beginning. Next time, I would use a sturdy piece of round card board on top of the bottom ball, supported by three or four dowels.

The snail's body is a candy cane-shaped cookie broken in two. His shell is made of two tops of mini muffin cupcakes "glued" together with frosting. The large toadstool is the top of a regular sized cupcake supported by two stacked bottoms of minimuffins. The smaller toadstools are vanilla wafers supported by gumdrops. The flower is a cookie, as are the letters spelling my daughter's name. I just inserted toothpicks into the cookies right when they came out of the oven.

This cake was so much work but so much fun!