Coolest Gerbil Cake

by Hilary
(UK)

Homemade Gerbil Cake

My children have 4 gerbils so we had to have a gerbil cake. The cake is a normal round chocolate cake, iced in purple and chocolate. The 4 gerbils are each made of a small chocolate sponge roll (unwrapped!). I used a knife to shape the gerbils' bottoms and cut a further roll into pieces to make pointed heads. I used icing to stick the heads to the bodies then iced each gerbil in a different shade of brown (to match our gerbils) and used a fork to roughen up the icing to look like fur. I added ears and tail made of ready made icing and little chocolate drops as eyes.

The gerbils love playing inside cardboard tubes so I made a tube of chocolate. To do this I wrapped non-stick parchment paper around a cardboard tube and brushed on layers of melted chocolate. I put this in the refrigerator to harden then gently removed the cardboard from inside. This was fiddly, but it did save me making so many gerbils - as I put a head of one colour at one end of the tube and the bottom and tail of a different coloured gerbil at the other end!