Karis’s Fifth Birthday Cake
Melissa baked and decorated this bunny for Karis, a friend of ours’ daughter.
Tags: bunny, cake
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on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:07 pm by Arthur and is filed under Cakes, Photos.
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I would love to bake this for my daughter’s birthday! Did you use the 3-d bunny mold from Wilton? What is the size of the sheet cake? Any other tips/directions would be great!
Yes, I did use the Wilton 3-D bunny pan. The sheet cake was 9×13. I think I followed the bunny pan’s directions for decorating it. The eyes are chocolate chips, and the rest is frosting. The flowers on the sheet cake were made with star tip #2D, and the centers with a #5 round tip. I think the bunny’s fur was done with a #18 star tip. The name is in a #233 grass tip. The border leaves are a #67 leaf tip. I ended up with several colors of icing: pink, yellow, violet, light green, and dark green. You only need a small amount of the pink, yellow, and violet for the flowers; I did an equal amount of the white and light green since they were my coverage colors. If you have enough white, put a very thin crumb layer over the bunny to keep the dark cake from showing through between the fur.
I do wish I had baked the bunny cake a little longer. I used a pound cake batter, which was more dense than a regular yellow cake, so the center was underbaked (much to the delight of all the adults at the party!), but I feel that it held the bunny shape very well. It’s hard to test the cake when it’s all enclosed in the pan, but next time I will be sure to put a skewer into the middle of the cake to make sure it’s cooked. The sheet cake is just a plain yellow cake.
Good luck, and let me know how it goes!
Thanks Melissa for all the info. A few more questions: Did you use the butter cream frosting recipe on the Wilton pan’s directions? Is the 9X13 a single layer cake? How did the dense bunny pound cake not leave an indentation in the sheet cake? Beautiful cake!
I used a buttercream recipe from my grandmother, who got it from Wilton about 30 years ago and added her own special touches. It contains 3 pounds of powdered sugar, and is intended to cover a small wedding cake, I think. Needless to say, I had a lot leftover. I probably should have cut it by 1/3, using only 2 pounds of sugar. The current Wilton recipe is perfectly good for this purpose.
The 9×13 is a single layer. I did not torte it or anything. With all the icing on the outside, it didn’t need anything in the middle.
I was concerned about leaving an indentation in the cake, which is why I put it in the corner. I figured that if it did sink in, it would not be as obvious. For extra stability, I put two bamboo skewers through the bunny, all the way down through the sheet cake to the bottom. Luckily I did not have a problem. If you do have some sinking, you can always just run a bead of frosting with a star tip around the base of the bunny to even it out.
I found a recipe on the Baking Bites blog for a lighter pound cake, which I will use next time I make a cake in this pan. You can find it here: http://bakingbites.com/2010/03/how-to-make-wiltons-3d-bunny-cake/.