Using a frog birthday cake design to make a dessert is a creative and unique way to celebrate a special event. If you want to create a photogenic cake, you can't do much better than the green frosting and fun, eye-catching detail of a sweet, edible frog!
Finding a Frog Birthday Cake Design
Before you start your cake, you need to decide whether you want to design your own model or follow a model for a frog cake that already exists. You can find a wide variety of cake designs to modify or adopt as your own by doing an image search online for "frog cake" or a similar term. Some images are accompanied by detailed, step-by-step instructions and others are not, but you should be able to get a good idea of how the cake is baked and put together by looking at a high-quality picture. Visit cake decorating websites for inspiration.
Making your own design gives you complete creative freedom and is an especially good choice if you're an advanced decorator. Your familiarity with how to use different types of frosting and cake decorating tools will prove to be an asset when you're designing your own dessert. This is because you won't be limited by the difficulty of forming cakes into specific shapes or adding detail to your decorations. Try sketching out a few designs from different angles and coloring them in to get an idea of how they would look when they're finished. If you don't have advanced decorating skills, you can draw out designs on a flat rectangle that symbolizes a baked sheet cake. It's much easier to pipe on detailed designs and shapes with a pastry bag and tip than it is to cut and form a cake into a frog shape and then frost and decorate it.
Wilton Frog Birthday Cake Designs
Wilton, America's most famous manufacturer of home and commercial cake decorating equipment, once produced a frog cake pan that has since been discontinued. The model is available through some secondhand stores and auction sites such as eBay, however, so if you want a simple way to make a cake that is already in the shape of a frog, it may be worthwhile to see if you can track down a used version of the pan.Wilton also offers free cake designs on its Web site. Its Lucky Leap Frog cake is made using a stand-up teddy bear cake pan and a standard round cake pan. Wilton provides detailed instructions for how to decorate the cake, but since the process involves so many steps and time-consuming procedures, it's a cake that is better suited to advanced decorators.
The company's other frog cake designs, Leap Frog cake and On the Tip of His Tongue cake, use simple shaped pans as bases and are much more accessible for beginning cake decorators.
Other Ways to Make a Frog Cake
If you don't have any customized pans, don't worry! It's easy to make a frog birthday cake design with just a round cake pan or a sheet cake pan.
- One idea is to bake a 9-inch by 13-inch rectangular sheet cake, remove it from the pan and let it cool, frost it with white buttercream, and use a pastry bag and round decorating tip to pipe on a frog design.
- You can also bake a round cake, remove it from the pan and let it cool, and frost it with green buttercream. Do the same thing with two standard-size cupcakes and two mini loaves. Use a sharp serrated knife to shape the ends of the mini-loaf cakes into webbed feet, and put all the pieces together to form a frog.
- Finally, you can bake a flat rectangular cake and use a sharp knife to carved the cooled cake into the shape of a frog. Frost the finished cake with green buttercream, and outline the shape with a round tip and pastry bag filled with white buttercream.
