When you are asked to make your daughter’s favorite dance teacher’s 18th Lorax birthday cake, you say absolutely yes! This was such a fun cake to make. It was simple, yet difficult in certain areas for me. Some day after much practice, hopefully those difficult areas will become easier for me. While I was decorating this cake, I put my daughter in charge of making a card for her. She even made a sweet little book for her as well. I just love how much she admires her wonderful dance teacher.
Other than cake decorating, our week has been pretty normal. My husband was out of town on Tuesday, so this was the first time that I was required to take my wild toddler with me to Awana. To my surprise, he did amazing! He listened so well, and participated in everything. I was so beyond proud of him. My baby boy is growing up! Little milestones are my favorite, and bring a few tears to my eyes. I am so happy that he is starting to be more independent.
Lorax Birthday Cake Recipes
To start out with, I want to share the amazing recipes that I used to create this super delicious cake. This dance teacher wanted a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. My go to recipes lately, have been found on Sugar & Sparrow’s Pinterest page. Every cake recipe I have tried from her, has been incredible. There is nothing I would want to change in her recipes. Please go check her recipes out! For this Lorax birthday cake, I used this one-bowl chocolate cake recipe.
For the cream cheese frosting, I went searching for a recipe that would taste amazing as well as have structure to it. Normal cream cheese frosting is soft, and generally doesn’t harden enough in the refrigerator to sculpt. I ended up finding this amazing cream cheese buttercream. It has butter in it to help it harden in the refrigerator. I did notice that the butter did take away some of the cream cheese flavor. It still tasted amazing, but there is an option to add cream cheese emulsion. I will probably do that next time I make it to see if it makes a difference.
Those are the recipes I used for this cake. It turned out super delicious, and it was a big hit!
Lorax Birthday Cake Decorating
Since I have made a few posts already about stacking and decorating cakes, instead of tell it all over to you again, I will just share some tips and tricks I found along the way!
Stacking Cake
When I bake my cake layers and let them mostly cool, I like to wrap them in plastic wrap and put them in the freezer for a day or so. This helps them maintain a certain amount of moistness. Then, I set them in the refrigerator to thaw the night before I want to decorate them. Normally, I unwrap the layers and put them directly on my turntable to cut the tops off of them. This time, I picked up the layer with the plastic wrap under it still and placed it on my turntable. When I cut off the top to level the layer out, there was no mess to clean up. All of it went onto the plastic wrap, and I didn’t have to wipe up all of the crumbs off of my turntable. This is not a necessary step, but I just found it so simple and very helpful.
When I went to stack the cakes, I used the white cream cheese buttercream in the layers and as the crumb coat. There is a lot of food dye that goes into an orange cake, so it didn’t need to be in the parts of the cake that wasn’t visible. I also placed these 8 inch layers about an inch from the edge of a 12 inch cake board. This is so, I can add writing to the cake board. Once the crumb coat was done, the cake went into the freezer, so that the frosting layer could harden before putting the orange layer on over it.
The Lorax
This part of the cake, was probably the most difficult and time consuming for me. Getting that layer of orange buttercream perfectly smooth is quite the task. I keep experimenting to find the best way to smooth a cake. Hopefully some day I will find a quicker way of doing this. For now, I think it turned out pretty well. I simply kept cooling the cake, and then running hot water over my cake scraper and offset spatula. This really helped to get it smooth. It isn’t perfect, but I did my best. The more I practice, the better I will get at it.
Also, this part of the Lorax birthday cake was based on a picture that they wanted it to look like. If it was up to me, I would have rather of piped the whole thing with a fur tip, than spend hours smoothing it out. Either way, it would have taken quite some time. Piping fur on it, would have been less stressful for me. I do like a challenge though.
The Face
Then it was time to add the details of the face! I started by planning out where the nose, mouth, and eyes would go. For the eyes, I used the fat end of a piping tip to make a perfect circle for each eye.
After that, I just had fun. I started by piping the white of the eyes. For this, I used a round tip, and held it in the very center of the circle until the frosting filled the entire circle. When the frosting started to crust over, I simply flattened out the center of the eye with my finger.
Next, I used a piping bag full of yellow with the tip cut off of it to create the mustache. I started by piping two mounds of frosting on each side to create some height to the mustache. Then I piped curved lines of frosting starting at the top of the mustache from the center and out. Before finishing the bottom of it, I piped a U-shaped mouth with orange frosting and a rounded tip. Then I covered the edges of the mouth with more mustache lines.
For the eyes, I used edible icing paint, and painted blue on the center of the eyes with my Wilton paint brush. Once the blue was dry, I painted a small dot of black in the center of the blue. With the orange frosting, I piped eyelids over the upper portion of the white eyes. Then I piped some eyebrows above the eyelids just like I did with the mustache. Lastly, I piped the orange nose the same way that I piped the eyes, only I made it taller.
Finish Face Details
Once the cake cooled in the freezer for a bit, I took a Wilton paint brush to refine details of the mustache and eyebrows, and smooth out the eyelids. For the nose, I used a rounded fondant tool to add nostrils. The main part of the Lorax birthday cake was done!
Cake Board
Before I proceeded to decorate the cake board, I decided that the cake board would need more thickness, so that the decorations on the board wouldn’t get ruined when picking up the cake. I used a hot glue gun to glue three 12 inch cake boards together. Then I added hot glue to the top of the three boards, and sat the cake board that the cake was on, on top of it. Once that was done, I began to spread green frosting all over the top surface of the cake board. In the inspiration picture, it was all orange with yellow writing. I felt like it was too orange, so I decided green grass with Truffula tree accents would be more exciting for this Lorax birthday cake.
Once the green had hardened in the freezer, I took yellow frosting and a small round piping tip to write out the words. This was another difficult area for me. I had to scrape the writing off a couple of times before I was happy with it.
Next, I used a grass tip to add green grass in random spots on the base. Then I took orange, pink, and purple frosting with small star and round tips to pipe little Truffula tree poofs on the words. I love how much those little poofs added that much needed dashes of color to this cake.
To finish off the cake, I hot glued yellow 5/8″ ribbon around the four layers of cake board. Normally I wouldn’t do this thick cake board, but I felt that it was necessary for this particular cake.
A Small Pumpkin Cake
When this Lorax birthday cake was finished, we had the thin layers of chocolate cake that were cut off of the top leftover. After we delivered the cake, my kids and I had a playdate with some very good friends. I decided instead of freezing the left overs or throwing them away, I would make a small cake for our friends to enjoy. I took the 3 thin layers and cut them with my pumpkin cookie cutter.
Then I used my leftover cream cheese buttercream to stack the three layers and pipe a cute design on top. It was just perfect to go with the delicious pumpkin chocolate chip cookies!
If you are interested in the softest and most delicious pumpkin chocolate chip cookies ever, you can read my blog post about them at https://homelovedmama.com/easy-pumpkin-desserts-for-fall/.
A Lorax Birthday Bible Lesson
When I think of The Lorax, I can easily see how you can make it into a Bible story. God created this beautiful world for us to live in and enjoy it. He also, expects us to take care of it and make it grow for Him.
In this world, we have a choice to make. We can either let our life be destroyed by jealousy or anger, and not follow God. Or we can grow in God by spreading His love and seeds everywhere we go. When we follow God, it is our job to share our faith with the world. We will not help this world by keeping it to ourselves. We will not help His seeds to grow if we don’t do anything.
None of this can be accomplished without God. We need Him in our heart so that we can touch the lives of everyone we meet through Him. By believing in Him, we can make this world beautiful again.
“Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” – John 15:4
I’m sure there are many other ways to turn The Lorax into a Bible lesson, but this is what I think about when I think about the story of The Lorax.
Have a wonderful week friends!!!