Team Umizoomi Cake

I just spent the weekend making this Team Umizoomi birthday cake for my niece. I had no idea who they were when my sister-in-law asked me to make her birthday cake. It looked simple enough and actually I didn’t have any major heartache over it like I do with some of my cakes.

I made a simple vanilla cake with buttercream frosting and covered it in fondant. The figures are made with a 50/50 mix of fondant and gum paste.

I started with three 9×13 sheet cakes stacked. I froze them for an hour, maybe two (I sort of lost track of time while working on jam). Freezing the cakes slightly makes it much easier to carve.

Then I started carving, trying to at least make it resemble the car in the cartoon.

I gave it a very thin layer, crumb coat, of buttercream and let it sit for a few hours and then added another layer of buttercream. While that was drying out a bit I started coloring all of my fondant.

Then it was on to the details. I did the car first. Covered it in orange fondant. For the interior I used white and made to bench seats for the figures to sit on. Then cut the eyes and mouth out using large circle biscuit cutters.

Bot was next. He was a little fussy but not as bad as I thought he would be. I used toothpicks to hold the head on to the body and to keep the arms attached to the body. I also brushed a bit of water wherever I wanted to pieces to connect, the water acts like a glue almost.

Then there were the other two figures They were pretty easy, just some round balls and something resembling a body. All of the little details are fondant. I painted the eyes and the flowers on Millie’s dress with a mixture of clear vanilla extract and paste food coloring.

So there you have it. Team Umizoomi! My niece loved it and of course they had to pull out the figures and play with them.