Planning a Tigger-themed birthday party? A little worried about your less-than-stellar culinary skills? Here are some fun, creative, and not-too-difficult ideas for any parent who plans on making their own homemade birthday cake for their child’s Tigger party.
Create a DIY shaped Tigger face cake – Bake one or two standard 13″x9″ rectangle cakes; one will make a single layer, two will make a double layer cake. If making two, stack both layers with frosting inbetween. Next, find and print an image of Tigger’s face from the internet – try finding an image you like from Tigger Clip Art.
Place the face stencil on top of the cake and score around it with a knife. Remove the stencil and carefully finish cutting the shape. Once the additional pieces are removed, apply a crumb coat of light frosting to seal the cake and prevent crumbs from showing. Next, mix frosting in batches of orange, light yellow and a small amount of pink. Apply the colored frosting to the different parts of the cake, looking to your picture for direction. Use purchased black decorator’s icing for drawing the lines and stripes on the face, finishing your Tigger birthday cake.
Bake with a Tigger-shaped cake form – If you’d still like your cake to be in the shape of Tigger without going through all the work (or not confident in your drawing and cutting skills), try baking your Tigger cake from a pre-shaped cake pan. These are available from the Wilton company, and are available on the Wilton website, eBay, at many arts & craft stores, and even in stores such as WalMart. Here is the Tigger cake pan available on Wilton’s website.
To decorate the a pre-shaped Tigger cake, you will mix frosting in batches of orange, light yellow, pink, white and black. The frosting can be laid smooth or applied with a special decorating tip to achieve the textured “star” effect.
Draw a Tigger scene on top of a standard cake– If you’re a bit more confident in your artistic abilities, find a Tigger image on the internet and draw the scene in colored frosting on top of the cake. It will be a good idea to use special decorator’s tips for applying icing if you plan on creating a detailed image. Here’s an example of a Tigger scene created with frosting. Alternatively, if you have experience with fondant, you could create your characters in fondant to decorate your cake as well – here’s an example of a fondant Tigger cake.
Add character cake toppers – For a child’s party, you can bake a delicious homemade birthday cake that will be eaten within minutes while still giving the birthday boy or girl a keepsake of the event by purchasing a Tigger cake topper. If your kid loves Tigger, Piglet and Pooh, here’s a cute cake topper with all three characters. Any standard round or rectangle cake can be baked, and you can choose to either keep the cake plain to highlight the characters on top, or frost the cake in color to complement the colors and scene of the topper decoration.
Create a super easy tiger-striped cake – Why go through the work of cutting or decorating a specific Tigger character, when a simple tiger-striped cake will do the job itself? With the rest of your Tigger-themed party decorations, baking a standard 13″x9″ cake that you have covered in orange frosting and decorated with black tiger stripes will fit right in without being any trouble at all.
As you can see, baking a Tigger-themed birthday cake doesn’t have to be expensive, time-consuming or difficult. Whether you choose to bake a special character shaped cake, or simply decorate a standard cake, any of these homemade ideas are sure to delight your child and the rest of your birthday party guests, while keeping you sane in the kitchen.
Sources:
Disney: Classic Characters – Tigger
Tigger Clip Art
Pooh, Piglet and Tigger Cake Topper at Birthday Express
Tigger decorated cake in frosting
Tigger decorated cake in fondant
Wilton Tigger Cake Pan
