Happy Birthday to my two little monsters!
This "
Backson" birthday cake has been at least 6 months in planning. The boys decided long ago this was the cake they wanted for their birthday. They LOVE the
Winnie the Pooh movie, and my Jax can recite the entire Backson short (with accent, pause, inflection) perfectly!
Now, you'd have to be crazy to actually want to make this cake, so I'll just give you the run down of the how-tos in case you want to make some kind of 3D Monster cake of your own.
For reference, this is what I was going for:
(Photo Courtesy:
The Disney Wiki)
The cake started with a sketch-- I'm not much of an artist, you can see.
I decided to use two 8"x3" round cakes to form the body... and place a 6"x2" round for the "chin" and two 5"x2" cakes for the top of the head. (Above you see the head. I iced each part separately, then used dowel rods to support them and keep them sturdy. I'll explain that below.)
My husband tackled the base. We wanted the Backson to be standing, so he made an 8" round wooden base, with two skinny dowel rod legs, and a fatter dowel rod tail - that went off at an angle. All nailed together and to a 14" square base below.
I covered the dowels with fondant-- and made fondant knee caps to give him some shape to those skinny legs.
Creating the arms and hands was a nightmare for me. I ended up using paper towel tubes which I cut, bent and taped. And I hot-glued lollipop sticks inside to stick into the cake, and to skewer the hands on to. The stripes on the arms and the hands were made of a 50/50 Fondant and Gum Paste Blend.
For cake assembly... I added two wooden (food-safe) dowel rods in the body cake... I then used ribbon fed through and hot glued into the paper towel tubes to help support the weight of the hands and arms. I placed the head over those ribbons. (You can see the purple ribbon there on the left side.) The lollipop sticks alone would NEVER have held up the arms without the added support of the ribbon.
To keep it as sturdy as possible, I also stuck a dowel through the head, through the board the head rests on, and into the body. (Sharpen the dowel with a pencil sharpener and tap it with a hammer- or heavy handled spatula- to get it through the cardboard cake board.)
To give the Backson his "hide like a shaggy rug," I used a Tip #233. (This is one of my favorite decorating tips ever. Hair, grass, fur... it's fantastic! But it does make your hand tired after a while!!)
I also used Tip #233 to make the red "mop of hair" on top. Everything on his face was buttercream, with the exception of the "ring of gold" in his nose, which was fondant, painted with gold Pearl Dust.
The one drama with the cake was when the nose fell off thanks to a warm, sunny morning in my kitchen. Oops! But I replaced it, no problem! (I did stress immensely and cry before it was no problem, though!)
Oh, and his horns-- they were a pain. They are pure fondant/gum paste, so they are HEAVY! They're also made on lollipop sticks, but they didn't want to stay up too well, so I just stuck them in shortly before the party started, and thankfully they made it through!
My boys' favorite part of the cake destruction was taking the head off. You can see the poor Backson here with his head on a stake.
Another weird thing was that the fur all fell off when I cut the body into pieces... so my Charley and his zombie friend, Audrey, decided they needed to sneak in and eat some after I left the cake unattended. (Because, you know, there wasn't enough icing on the cake already!)
The Backson head was all that was left after the Birthday Party. I just can't bring myself to cut the poor guy's head open!
My boys loved their cake. Next year... I think we'll go for something simple... a spider was one request. That, I can do!
Click the Links Below to See:
Other Cake Decorating Ideas
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Last Year's DIY Jack-O-Lantern Birthday Cakes
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My daughter loves your cake. Thank you for sharing it She wants me to tell you she's 4 years old.
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