Go Diego Party

My good friends, Cheri and Jonathan, were giving their son, Preston, a first birthday party and they asked me to make a cake and cupcakes.  I was of course honored.  What was the theme, Go Diego, of course.  I knew for the cake I was going to do a safari theme like I did for Benjamin's birthday.  For the cupcakes I searched the internet high and low to find the easiest and perfect Diego cupcakes.  I finally found them at Nick.com.

For the cupcakes, I made chocolate cupcakes topped with vanilla frosting.  For the Diego details I used mini M&M's (eyes), fruit roll-ups (mouth), cheerios (ears), nd for the hair I had a template and traced with melting chocolate.  For Baby Jaguar I tinted the frosting with a few drops of orange food coloring and couple drops of brown  I used red and orange dots candy (nose and ears), mini m&M's (ears), and black frosting for the whiskers and mouth.  I think these turned out very cute, I did make a joke that Diego kinda had a Don King fro, but they were still adorable.  If you would like to make these cupcakes here is the link: http://www.nickjr.com/recipes/diego-cupcakes.jhtml.

For the cake I also made a chocolate cake, adopted by Martha Stewart's Devil Food Cake Recipe.  I did a two layer cake filled with vanilla buttercream frosting and tinted green to resemble grass.  For the decorations I used piping gel tinted blue for the lake surrounded by crumbled graham crackers to resemble sand.  I used green laffy taffy ropes for the tree trunks and piped green frosting with a star tip to resemble leaves.  I made a fondant elephant and baby jaguar for figurines to complete the cake. I'm getting more and more comfortable with decorating cakes as it is much easier to decorate cupcakes which I love.  Let me know what you think about the cake.

 

I had a lot of fun making the cake and cupcakes and look forward to my next baking project.