Monkey jungle cake toppers

I’m a cake girl. I totally agree with Julia Child and firmly believe that it isn’t a celebration without cake. My problem is deciding on the cake.

Ollie’s Birthday cake had to be a monkey in some shape or form and not covered in fondant cause I wanted him to be able to eat it. To Pinterest I went and after combining a lot of ideas, this is what I came up with.

Now when you look at this monkey, keep in mind that art is not my best skill but I was actually pretty proud of my monkey cake topper efforts.

I started with some instructions from Martha Stewart which resulted in something that looked more like a possum than a monkey. I would also recommend buying actual brown fondant icing because making it from white is tricky and time consuming.

I don’t have specific measurements for you because it depends how big you want your monkey to be (that and I didn’t measure because I kept chopping and cutting bits off and adding a bit) but if you follow this rough guide you should be right.

The banana I totally made up. I rolled a little log of the same colour as the monkey’s face then rolled out a circle of yellow and dusted it with a lot of corn flour so it wouldn’t stick to the banana.

I then wrapped it around with the join at the back and used a knife to cut the rest of the ‘peel.’ A little scraping down the sides of the banana with the knife made it more authentic.

The cake was still a little boring with just the monkey - needed to be a bit more jungle-ified with camouflage letters on leaves.

You can use different colours but I was too lazy to make any more so stuck with the monkey colours and added black. All you do is roll out the lightest colour, place blobs of the other two all over the place and roll it out flat.

Then cut out the letters you need and enough leaves to stick them on. The leaves are green fondant cut out with a heart shape cutter and then shaped with veins added with a toothpick.

Add the stick to the leaf before adding the letter by ‘glueing’ (with a bit of water) a small piece of extra icing over the stick at the back and pressing gently. Then turn the stick over, wet the back of the letters and stick them down.

Leave everything to dry out for at least a few days. Once it is dry to touch, pop it on a wire rack to dry through. You will need to turn the letters over to make sure the bottoms dry if you don’t have a rack.

I made mine about 3 weeks in advance and kept them in air-tight containers. Whenever we had the air-con on I took the lids off for a few hours just to make sure they were dry and wouldn’t go mouldy.

There you have it - monkey jungle cake toppers. I hope that made at least a little bit of sense.

What about you? Have you attempted to make anything from fondant?