How To Make A Leopard Print Cake For Teens And Tweens

Looking to make a more grown-up cake for your tween or teen? We recommend you give this leopard print cake a try.

With the inside of the cake full of leopard spots, this cake is seriously cool. One of the great things about this cake is you can have fun with colours, whether you're looking to make a pink leopard print cake or go for more traditional colours, we've got you covered.

For more ideas, why not follow our guides on how to create an alternative masterpiece like this mer-mazing cake or even one of these guitar cakes!

Ingredients:

For The Leopard Cake Batter:

Three large eggs

17g of butter

175g caster sugar

175 self-raising flour

1 tsp of vanilla essence (swap this out for cocoa powder if you're making a chocolate batter for your cakes)

1tbsp of baking powder

Pink food colouring

Bright blue food colouring

Black gel food colouring

For The Animal Print Buttercream:

600g of icing sugar

300g of unsalted butter

However, you can use fondant to decorate your cakes if you find this more comfortable to work with.

Equipment Needed:

3 bowls for mixing

A spoon or a hand whisk

3 cake tins- 9 inch

Piping bags

Spatula

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 180° and grease the tins for your cakes with butter or parchment paper.

2) Take the sugar and butter, put them in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Once mixed, add the eggs to the mixture and whisk.

3) Add the flour into the mixture of eggs, butter and sugar. Sieve the flour if possible to remove any lumps in the cake.

Once you've added the flour, drizzle the vanilla essence in and split the batter into 3. However, do not do this equally as you want one of the mixtures to have more in as this will be the primary colour of your cake.

4) To add them into the cake pans and make a leopard print effect, you will need to cover the bottom of a cake tin in the blue batter, followed by creating rings of the black using a piping bag; the rings need to start larger and work their way in as you get to the middle.

To complete this stage of the cake, you need to go over the black circles with the pink batter and then repeat with the black.

5) Next, you will need to fill in the gaps left from the circles with the blue. Once you've done this, you need to go over the black and pink.

Make sure this is done with a piping bag in circles to allow the effect to work. Then repeat this with the other two cakes. This is the final step for preparing your leopard print sponge cake before moving onto the decoration of the cakes.

6) Pop your cakes into the oven to bake for 25-30 minutes and once they are ready, let them cool down on a cooling rack until they're room temperature. Once they're cool, it's time to move on to the cake decorating.

7) To start with, you will need to make buttercream icing to stick the cake layers together by adding the butter and sugar into a bowl and then whisking it until it forms a smooth texture.

To create an extra layer of excitement to your cake, add some food colouring in the buttercream. Be sure to put some aside for later when it comes to decorating the outside of the cake.

When applying the buttercream, be sure to make sure it's all level, so your cakes sit nicely on top of each other.

8) Following on from this you will be required to cover around the cake with buttercream, using a spatula can be a great tool to do this. However, a knife will also work.

Once you've covered the sides, it's time for the top. Apply the buttercream fondant as before making sure it's neat and has a clean finish.

You want your cake to be covered so you cannot see the cake underneath it, so this may take a few layers. Then place in the fridge for 15 minutes to set.

9) Using the buttercream that you placed aside earlier, split it again and add blue food colouring to one half. Using the blue half, fill up a piping bag and snip the end off and aim to create spots with the fondant, then flatten each one with a spatula, so it looks like leopard spots.

10) The final step involves either an icing pen or working with buttercream, use the remainder of the buttercream to put it in a piping bag. Create a small hole or place a nozzle in the bag and go around the leopard spots with a black outline to add the finishing touches.

Tips and Tricks

• You can change the colours and flavours of the cake. For the buttercream, why not add some cocoa powder to make a chocolate batter for your cake? Equally, you could buy some ready to roll icing and create a fabulous animal leopard print fondant.
• Removing any mistakes when creating the detail on the outside of your cake is easy when you have a toothpick as you can gently scrape off the excess.
• For your cake, if you're not keen on buttercream, fondant or ready to roll icing is a perfect alternative. Although fondant may be a little harder to work with, you're still bound to get an exciting result.
• To store your cake you can wrap it up in clingfilm and leave it out for a few days, but if you're looking at freezing it long term, it's worth cutting up the cake into the slices you want to freeze, then wrapping them in clingfilm before adding them into a ziplock bag. The cake can stay fresh in the freezer for roughly three months.
• We understand that not everyone is a professional when it comes to cake decorating, but with leopard print cakes, the markings don't need to be perfect as they all vary so much. The same applies to other animal print not just on the leopard cake such as tiger stripes or the thick stripes on a zebra.