'JUNGLE' Party - any ideas? and help needed with the CAKE!! (I want to make it this year)

[Disenchanted3]

I have made cakes before and am good at it, but just lemon drizzle, fairy cakes, sponge cakes ... never decorated!

Just looking for help with the cake and just seeing if anyone has any cool 'jungle' themed ideas.

Thanks!

Tiger face could be pretty easy - or monkey.
A snake could be do-able.
I tend to just cover a square cake with coloured icing (in this case, green) then decorate with differently coloured icing (in this case various shades of green in little leaf shapes) then go mad with Playmobil (in this case, trees, animals etc).

when you say coloured icing do you mean that stuff you rollout?

Yep - I buy white and then dye it with food colouring by sort of kneading it in. I'm sure there will be more knowledgeable people who can tell you in more detail or a more efficient way but that's always worked for me!

Right thanks

I like the playmobile idea, haven't got any but could get bits of animal sets i think

jungle theme

safari theme

more jungle

cake making kits; there are a couple of jungle themed ones.

It means that your cake looks really good, without you actually having to be brilliant at icing, or moulding things out of marzipan or anything.

I've done loads in the past and they've all looked great but really they haven't been much effort because it's more an assembly job and having an eye for what looks nice where.

Have fun!

I've seen a brilliant cake in a book somewhere. Basically, you make a "ring" shaped cake (like a dough-nut with a hole in the middle) and cover it will fondant icing (the sort you roll out). Then, you make lots of different colour snakes and have them all slithering out of the middle of the ring. You could, of course, do the same thing really easily by using those long jelly snakes from the sweet shop.

Sounds fun LF, think i'll try the plain jungle one for now

Not cake but invitation idea...

DS's 3rd was a jungle birthday, I printed a b/w jungle picture on one side of an A4 sheet of paper and the wording on the other, asking all guests to colour in the pic and bring to the party. Then I rolled the invites up and tied with a green ribbon.

At the party I had a washingline up where I pegged all the pics as guests arrived - it looked great and served as easy decoration, too...

The cake, like mentioned above, was also green icing (shredded coconut died in food colouring for grass effect) with plastic animals on top.

Hi Disenchanted, I started making my kid's birthday cakes about 4 years ago and it really in't as hard as you might think.I now get admiring comments at their parties about the cakes I went to the library and borrowed loads of the kid's cake books to start with. Buttercream icing is easy to start with but sugar paste is ok if you have time to practice a bit.There is also a website called Cakecentral.com which has lots of advice. There's a butter iced lion in Quick and easy Kids' Cakes by Sara Lewis if that's the sort of thing you are looking for. Best of luck

Hope it goes well! As for the cake, Playmobil on top is the easiest and very effective. You could do a lion's head though without too much difficulty. Make a round cake as normal and cover top with yellow roll out icing. Then make some yellow butter icing and pipe little lines all round bottom of cake onto board. Repeat with a second layer overlapping and keep going until you get a mane effect. Add eyes, nose andmouth made of more fondant icing - you can even buy it already coloured. Its so easy, even I did it!

How old is your lo? We had a jungle party for ds's 5th and had some jungle themed games (to add to the 'normal' ones - jungle treasure hunt went down well, and we had a game where we oput huge cardboard palm trees on the floor, stuck balloons to them, and they crawled up (like monkeys) in a sort of team relay.

I also did the playmobil style cake (using DUplo animals)- if you do two or three square cakes you can build them up and make a stream in the middle (for crocodiles & angelica reeds )