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I can’t even believe I’m typing this, but I have a 12 year old child (woah!). My first born had her birthday over the weekend and had a very specific cake request from me. Holly is a total goth-style-dark-colour-loving-alt queen, so I was completely surprised to see what she came up with.
I’m totally in love with this super cute pastel frog cake.
Last year, I made Holly one of my favourite cakes of all time – this Billie Eilish drip cake inspired by the music video for “When The Party’s Over”. I was expecting something a little darker this year – maybe goth inspired with Lolita elements. She surprised me when she sent me a text asking for a cake inspired by the photo below.
(Source Unknown)
My initial thought was “Frogs? Okay…..” But she stuck with it. She even requested I keep the icing a bit gritty and keep the frogs lumpy and adorable as can be. Why else do I have these cake making skills if not to please my children, right?
Here’s the finished pastel frog cake!
I was worried about the frogs looking a little too wonky, but this cake turned out absolutely adorable.
Here’s everything I used to make this pastel frog cake:
- Boxed french vanilla cake mix (this cake is also filled with caramel, but you can do whatever you’d like)
- Buttercream icing – I use this recipe
- Wilton gel icing colour in Leaf Green, Pink, Lemon Yellow, and Sky Blue.
- Hard candy eyeballs
- Round piping tips – I used a variety of Wilton tips, but you could absolutely do this with just a cut piping bag
- Piping bags
I love this cake because there’s only 1 decorating element – buttercream icing.
I baked and assembled the cake as per usual, and then proceeded to frost it in light leaf green icing. I made sure not to work too hard smoothing it out as we wanted a somewhat lumpy effect. I separated the remaining icing into 5 colours and put them in individual piping bags – green, pink, yellow, blue, and small amount of white.
Now it was time to decorate! This cake is amazing because there’s no need to be perfect, and better yet, no fondant. I piped the mushrooms around the base in various heights and sizes and didn’t even bother to smooth them out – I actually love how fluffy they look in photos!
The frogs were the biggest challenge as I worried about how I would get them to sit upright. I took my normal buttercream icing and thickened it using additional powdered sugar, piped a large base for each frog body, and then let the cake sit in the fridge for 15 minutes to harden. After that, it was very easy to stack more icing on top as well as add the arms, legs, and head. I just kept popping the cake back in the fridge to stabilize the bodies as I built them up. For the eyes, I added 2 balls of icing on top of the frog heads and pushed in a candy eyeball. Super easy!
I piped on the smaller details such as the hearts and frog faces last. Once the icing started to crust, I did a tiny bit of smoothing and it was finished!
I think in total, it took 30 minutes to pipe this cake. Not bad!
The wonky frogs on this cake absolutely crack me up. They’re so cute and weird – Just what Holly wanted.