Gloverly Cupcakes

I have always loved pandas. There’s something about them that makes them adorable. Many years ago my mum made me a panda cake for my birthday but despite my love of both pandas and cakes I’ve never made a panda cake myself. I decided it was time to change that. So this year I decided to make myself a panda cake for my birthday. My birthday was on a Monday and the weekend before I’d been trying out different red velvet cakes with my friend Nic to find the best recipe to use for her wedding cake, so it seemed sensible to use the left over cakes to create my own birthday cake. With hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best idea – it’s distressing enough cutting up a panda cake, but when it’s red on the inside… I’m still recovering from the traumatic experience. Having made one, I then got a request to make another – who wouldn’t want a panda cake for their birthday?! The second one I got to make was bigger and therefore better. It also wasn’t made from off cuts of cakes which probably helped. Panda cakes are actually pretty easy to make – I made the body in same way that I made my minions i.e. made lots of round cakes, sandwiched them together with buttercream and cut the top one to make it dome-shaped – I then covered the whole thing in a thin layer of buttercream before covering in white fondant icing.

The next steps were as follows:

1. I cut out a long strip of black fondant and stuck it on half way up the body going about 2/3rds of the way round.
2. I made a small dome of white icing (I squashed a ball of icing and shaped it to a circle using a round cutter) and stuck this to the middle of the face.
3. I cut out 2 thick circles of black icing and used a bigger round cutter to cut a small amount off the bottom of each so that they could be stuck to the top as ears.
4. I cut out another 2 thick circles (the same size) and suck some smaller white circles on to form the paws.
5. I cut out 2 thinner black circles and using the same round cutter cut a section off the bottom of each so that they fitted round the nose. I stuck these onto the cake.
6. Using some offcuts of cake (I’d made another cake the same day which needed shaping so I used that) I formed the 2 legs and covered these with black fondant and a circle of white fondant at the end.
7. I positioned the legs in place and used these to help support the top paws in place.
8. I stuck 2 small brown circles on for the eyes, followed by 2 smaller circles of black and then 2 dots of white.
9. Finally I added the nose (a small black circle of fondant icing) and the mouth (I piped this with black royal icing).

I sat the panda on a board covered in green icing and then added some flowers and leaves and Scarlett’s name. He ended up being a little more rough around the edges than I’d have liked because not only did Scarlett get this panda cake, she also got a Sooty cake – possibly a bit too much to make in one evening… I’ll never learn! He’ll be appearing very shortly…