Family, Food, and Fun: Curious George Cake

All of my kids love Curious George, so it was just a matter of time before one of them decided on a George birthday cake. This was the year.

I showed Annika numerous cakes from Cake Central and Coolest Birthday Cakes, but she wasn't too impressed with many of them, or they were going to be far too time consuming for me to undertake. I ended up showing her a bunch of George coloring pages online, and this was her favorite one.

I was a little nervous about how to do the details, because it isn't a huge cake and the fingers were pretty tiny, but it all ended up working out okay.

First, I baked a 13 x 9" chocolate cake, using this recipe. I froze it to make frosting it easier.

On party day, I whipped up a batch of buttercream frosting and tinted a couple of cups of it light yellow.

After frosting the cake, I placed the outline of the picture Annika had chosen on top and traced around it lightly with a toothpick.

Next, I tinted a small amount of frosting black (helps a lot if you add cocoa powder to it first - it's hard to get black frosting from white. I added a little extra cream to it, because the cocoa powder stiffened it up and it was hard to pipe.) I used my smallest Wilton tip to draw the basic outline, saving the details for later.

I tinted a tiny bit of frosting light brown with cocoa powder for the face, hands, and feet - and ended up spreading that on with toothpicks because my smallest tip was still in use with the black frosting. Then I added more cocoa to some frosting for George's body - and piped it on with my smallest star tip. I added in the rest of the details of George's face, hands, and feet both with my small tip and with a toothpick dipped straight in black food coloring.

The ice cream was the easy part - just pink and white with some black accents.

I used a larger star tip (#17, I think) for the border on the top of the cake, with tiny stars of white on top - and used a new tip, #199 for the shell border on the bottom. It was a lot of fun to use.