Cake: Alligator

One of my mom's coworkers (the one from this post) had a baby exactly one week younger than Josiah. And he, like my own little boy, just celebrated his 1st birthday. They had a whole jungle/safari theme and asked for an alligator cake for the party. They did have a picture from a book of an alligator cake that the mom received at a graduation celebration, but my mom and I weren't sure how we were going to turn that cake into one for a baby's 1st birthday. We, in general, were nervous about the whole endeavor having never made a shaped cake (without a pan) like this before. However, I was struck with an idea adapted from a treat we had at Josiah's party.

These pops were made by baking a cake, crumbling it up into tiny pieces, mixing it with cream cheese frosting, and then rolling them into balls and covering them with a candy or frosting coating. (I can give a more exact recipe if anyone asks for it.) So, since I was hesitant to take a full sheet cake and carve it into the shape of an alligator, but more confident that I could mold one instead, we decided to use this technique to sculpt an alligator shape.

We used this picture from google images to figure out the shape and design:

We baked 3 kinds of cake mixes, including cherry chip (my mom's favorite), chocolate, and funfetti. We baked all three in a giant pan together. Once the cake was baked and cooled, we cut it apart according to flavor and crumbled it into tiny pieces using our hands.

Then we made up the cream cheese frosting and added it in little bits at a time until it was a good consistency for sculpting. This is my mom mixing up the cream cheese frosting. She was making fun of me for taking pictures of EVERYTHING, but that's what you gotta do in a business like this...

 

...Josiah "helped" make the cake too!

From there, I just started molding each flavor into part of the alligator, starting with the snout and head, working towards the body and tail, and finishing up with the arms. It didn't look too appetizing at this point, but it did look like it was wearing a sweater :-)

Then we put a thin coat of crumb coat over it, which is just frosting spread very lightly so that the crumbs don't mix in with the rest of the frosting. 

After letting it set (which didn't do as much as we hoped), we covered it all in messy green icing. It didn't need to be very smooth as alligators have rough scaly skin. 

 

Once the frosting hardened a little bit, we made nails, eyes, and teeth out of white fondant and applied them to the alligator. My mom used a piping bag and cake decorating tips to make ridges along its back. I made a birthday hat out of scrapbooking paper and stickers and then we wanted a sign with a poem or phrase on it. It was midnight at this point, so my creative skills were lacking significantly. I came up with this poem:

 

My mom made fun of me, though, so we settled on this sign that I made instead:

This was the final result:

  

I was worried that it wasn't anything like the mom requested, other than being an alligator shaped cake, but everyone seemed to think it was pretty cute. The other aspect of this cake was that because we pre-mixed the icing and sculpted it, it was a lot more dense and sweeter than just regular cake. We advised them to cut smaller pieces than normal for the party. When I attended the birthday party the next day. John Douglas, the birthday boy, didn't end up eating hardly any of it, but everyone else said they enjoyed it. I had a piece and thought it tasted pretty good too. It was a learning experience for us, but we were happy with the results!