Mickey Mouse Cake

I was asked to make a cake for the birthday of a 2 year old boy and a 4 year old boy, the theme – Mickey Mouse. There were a number of ideas and sketches thrown around…Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Mickey Mouse hat, Mickey Mouse ears, Mickey’s face and maybe a few more. The cupcakes were one of my original sketches and ended up being perfect for the theme!

Then, one of the blogs I follow had recently posted a video about these adorable Mickey & Minnie caramel apples. I sent the link over to my friend and she loved them, so that solidified the plan for the cake.

Originally I was going to use the 6-inch cake as the head and cut out ears with cookie cutters from a larger cake; but I decided that it didn’t look as good. So, I used an 8 inch pan for the head and the 6 inch pans for the ears.

Getting Started
A while back I learned a nifty little trick for baking chocolate cakes; I think I saw it on a public television show, but I don’t remember exactly where I learned it. It’s a trick that I’ve used a few times and it definitely came in handy for this project.

Tip: When preparing your pans for a chocolate cake, use cocoa powder instead of flour after you grease the pans. The cocoa powder does not show up as much on a chocolate cake as the white flour would. And the cake comes out perfect!

Prepared Cake Pan

Cake Just Out of the Pan

After you get the cake layers level, assemble the layers with your desired filling. I used chocolate cream cheese icing. I then placed the cake in the fridge until I was ready to decorate.

Decorating

I used my usual buttercream icing recipe. For the ‘shorts’ I wanted to get a red sugar coating to match the caramel apples. I started by only frosting the bottom half of the cake with a red-ish tinted icing and then I covered with red sanding sugar. The top was easy, the sides were a little difficult and a little messy, but it eventually worked.

I then frosted the top half of the cake with chocolate icing that I tinted with black coloring. I frosted the ‘ear’ cakes with the same frosting. I smoothed out the frosting with an icing spatula. If you dip the spatula in hot water and wipe clean multiple times it helps smooth out the icing.

I thought doing the sugar coating on a cookie sheet would help contain the mess, but it didn't really.

I assembled the cakes on the cake board; make sure you 'glue' the individual cake boards to the large cake board with some icing.

Then used Wilton Decorating Icing (Red) to pipe a star border (Tip 21) around the entire cake. I have a hard time getting red icing as bright and vibrant as the pre-colored icing tubes, so I just bought some. Around the ‘shorts’ I topped the border stars with red hots and black Mickey head sprinkles that I found at Wal-Mart; the rest of the border I left as plain stars. I used the red icing to also attach two yellow jumbo confetti sprinkles.

Waiting in the fridge.

Boxed up and ready to go!

I was very happy with how the cake turned out. And even happier when I saw the cake, the cupcakes and the rest of the party décor…just wait until you see it!

Cupcakes will be posted tomorrow and the party post will go up on Wednesday!