Twin Animal Cakes: Elephant and Giraffe

My twin daughters turned two last month, and I wanted to try to make them a little cake each. For some reason a joint cake didn’t feel right, just as joint presents don’t; they are their own individual people and even though they share a lot we try to always treat them as individuals. Plus since I’d enjoyed trying it last summer for my eldest’s castle cake , I was happy to have an excuse to play with sugar paste again!

The girls received animal toys from their big sister on their first birthday, and they have both been inseparable from them since. Almost every picture we have of them has one or both of these toys in, so I tried to make them an elephant and giraffe cake each. Animal cakes are simple enough, and I made these sitting to match the toys, so had to make use of some cake modelling magic (rice crispy squares mix) to get the stand-up parts to work. I didn’t follow a plan or a recipe, so the elephant cake has a larger trunk than I meant, but I think they worked out nicely anyway. Rice crispy squares (melted marshmallows and rice crispies) are east to make and once set are great to work with. Once you’ve figured out to butter your hands – else you end up in one seriously sticky mess!

Best of all, the girls loved the animal cakes and instantly recognized who they were meant to be, which was lovely. We had a pretty quiet family tea-party, but their big sister had taught them the ‘Happy Birthday’ song so they enjoyed singing it over and over.

Here are a couple of the in-progress shots, and their beloved elephant and giraffe on which they were based.

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The top-heavy parts (giraffe neck and elephant trunk) and limbs are sugarpaste on the rice crispy mixture, secured with simple wooden skewers. The cake is just a victoria sponge which I carved to a half egg body shape.

They were genuinely quite simple to do – both were made from scratch in a couple of hours.