Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my!

As might be obvious from my recent cake adventures, there has been a lot of staff changes in the office where I work.  This month is no exception.  There are two more staff leaving at the end of the month.  With the cakes so far, I’ve managed to come up with something personalized for each one, but these two people are so different.  Their jobs in our office are really different, the jobs they’re going to are really different, and their personalities are also really different.  It was easy to come up with ideas for one of them, but I was completely stuck for the other.  I really didn’t want the cake to feel like the one was an afterthought so I went with something completely unrelated to either one.

Our office can be a bit of a zoo at times.  The workflow is always busy and the office is full of people with big personalities who like to have a lot of fun while they work hard.  It’s a good place to work but it can be a little crazy at times.  I got inspired by Wilton’s Silly Critters baking cups and decided to go with a zoo idea.  The thing was I didn’t want animals that large.  I thought about making fondant animals to stand on the cake, but decided I really only wanted animal faces. 

The challenge was how to make animal faces that I liked.  I looked online to find some generic cartoon animals that I could use as a pattern, but didn’t find any that seemed to be the right fit.  My options were getting limited and the time was passing on, so I decided to try drawing my own. My pencil drawing skills are really best for stick figures, so I made the animal face equivalent to give me at least the right shape to work with.

Some piping and a little painting with food colouring for some extra details and I had royal icing animal faces ready to go.  That sort of thing really should have more time to dry, so I left them overnight with a fan blowing on them, with my fingers crossed that they’d be dry enough to put on the cake in the morning without falling apart.  I couldn’t resist taking a picture of them still on their wax paper, just in case they didn’t make it.

Some careful use of an offset spatula while peeling the wax paper and the animals made it safely to the background of leaves and vines that I’d piped the night before.

Drawing with a pencil may not be my thing, but drawing with icing, that’s a lot more fun in my books!