Easy ideas to make a jungle cake?

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dd (aged 5) is mad on Africa, lions, tigers, jungle. Please help me find or make a suitable cake.

What about a cake covered with green icing and some plastic figures stuck on.You could make rocks and stuff out of cake and icing with lions on. A crumbled up flake could be dry African earth. Icing to make trees (or use plastic ones).

Or you could just make a lion cake.

I would do a square cake iced with green buttercream, distressed with a palette knife so you have ridges and points here and there. I would make vines out of cola laces and make leaves/foliage for them out of sugarpaste in a different shade of green.

You can then make a selection of animals to go on top - marzipan is easier to mould than sugarpaste but you can buy coloured sugarpastes too. I add colours to marzipan for making animals. Snakes are easy and can be really colourful. Monkeys with chocolate icing tails wrapped around the vines would look effective.

Also with this format if you don't feel confident making 3D animals you can just do flat 2D ones (a lion is easy - a starburst made out of orangey marzipan/suarpaste, a hump on one side with a tail, and a face in the middle)

What fun, I might do it myself on day

You could just stick these on a normal cake,or is that too boring?

Cinder toffee dusted with cocoa makes fab rocky outcrops - andsoft fine brown sugar is great for sand. You could do a pool with blue jelly, and put some exotic coloured flowers on it - simple to do and loads of colour.

I keep thinking of other cool things you could do with this

You could make some really colourful macaws and perch them on a choccy log (flake? Or a matchmaker?)

tiger would be really easy to do in 2D as well, just roll out some orange icing, lay thin sausages of black icing over it and then flatten gently with a rolling pin, then cut out you shape. Even if you were doing some of the other animals in 3D you could do this one 2D and put it on the cake before you lay the vines/fronds, it would create a fabulous illusion of perspective...

Rather less clever thn some of there but I have VERY fond memories of a safari cake my mum made - using cadbury's animal biscuits - huge flak cake, iced green, with brown roads with my brothers cars/jeeps driving round, and lots of bits from his train set as trees/bridges etc - choclate fingers for fences - you get the idea. It probably looked a sight - all that tat shoved all over it - but I thought it was marvellous - she iced every child's name onto the biscuit so we each had an animal to find...

You could make a swamp out of a splat of nutella and make the top half of a hippo (so it looks submerged), and a crocodile's nose/eyes poking out

Oh, and you could make palm trees really easily - make a couple of elongated star shapes out of green icing/marzipan, then use a blob of icing/melted chocolate to stick them to the top of small breadsticks or those cylindrical sweet biscuits you get with coffee - and just dig them into the cake.

Greenshoots - that last one is INSPIRED!!
Angelica bits for reeds too...

a voice of caution - we made palm trees like that once (with matchmakers). They looked good but took ages. I suggest downsizing your plan to a deforested jungle for an easy life - a bit of savannah or desert would be very easy to make. and you could blame the change of plan on environmental change and rainforest destruction too.

we made a zoo cake last week. downgraded from our original forest plan for time reasons. animals without those pesky trees (just cages made from matchmakers).

Gah, matchmakers are too fiddly and brittle, you were setting yourselves up to fail Breadsticks is what you want, and some melted chocolate for sticking - easy peasy lemon squeezy

Did you take any photos of dd1's cake, fennel? I would love to see! I hope the party went well?

We have a back catalogue of cake photos, GS.

party went well thanks. especially the pinata. One child announced loudly the next day (at the pacifist non-violent woodcraft folk meeting) that they'd murdered a donkey at dd1's party. DP had to explain himself to an onslaught of concerned parents

wow - great ideas so thanks. Any suggestions for decorating the room along jungle lines?

crepe paper green creepers. Use cuddly toys you already have which fit the jungle theme - hang them off the walls or creepers. get the children making paper flowers and fruits to put on the creepers (either before or during the party). or stick real fruit on to be plucked off during the party (that might be a bit ambitious).