I’m a casual baker, and I was able to pull off a cute teddy bear birthday cake for my daughter’s third birthday. I don’t bake a lot, but I love making birthday cakes in a different style for each of my kids’ birthdays.

My daughter is currently obsessed with teddy bears. What would be better for a teddy bear lover than a teddy bear cake?

Supplies Used:

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• For The Cake:
  • Springform Pan – 9 inch
  • Springform Pan – 10 inch
  • Cupcake Pan for Large Cupcakes
  • 2 boxes of Betty Crocker confetti cake mix
• For the Frosting: Ingredients for Savory Sweet Life’s Buttercream Frosting Recipe
  • butter
  • powdered sugar
  • vanilla
  • salt
  • heavy cream
  • plus food colouring drops
• For Decorating
  • Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for Paw Pads
  • Aero Mini Chocolates for Paw Toe Beans

Making The Cake Forms – No Special Pans Required!

For shaped cakes, I usually track down a character pan from Wilton and go from there. For this cake, however, I made everything with standard cake pan shapes I already had in my cupboard.

For the head, I used a 9 inch springform pan.

For the body, I used a 10 inch springform pan.

For the paws and the ears, I used cupcake pans that I got from Dollar Tree. The cupcake cavities are slightly larger than a standard cupcake. I used two pans that hold 4 cupcakes each, but I only filled 6 of the cupcake cavities.

This was already a large cake and already way too much for four people to enjoy in a timely manner, so I only did a single layer. If you are serving a crowd you could double everything to make this cake taller.

Assembling the Cake

I put the cakes in the fridge for 3 hours to make sure everything was chilled. After the two cakes and six cupcakes fully cooled, I assembled the cake as shown in the picture below.

This cake was quite large so I used an old cardboard box, trimmed it to size, and covered it with tinfoil to make a makeshift cake board.

I layered the head cake on top of the body cake and trimmed a slight moon-shaped wedge to allow the head and the body to nestle together.

For the paws, I didn’t trim anything, I just placed them close to the body. I wanted to be able to serve the cupcakes to my kids for our little party, so I figured sitting right beside would make it easy to pull it apart.

For the ears, I cut the cupcakes in half height wise, so that the ears weren’t full-height cupcakes. For the bear’s snout, which I didn’t capture in a photo (apologies!), I used the bottom half of one of the ears and placed it on the bottom half of the face.

Prepping the Buttercream Frosting

For the icing, I mixed up two colours. I mixed up a pale rosey colour. I was aiming for a nearly brown pink, so I used approximately 7 drops of green and 8 drops of red food colouring.

I mostly used Savory Sweet Life’s Buttercream Frosting Recipe. The recipe turned out great! I say mostly because I thought I had enough butter for two batches, but I only had enough icing for one. I used one batch of the buttercream frosting, which I used for the pink parts of the cake. Then I made up a batch of Jacksonsjob’s Old-Fashioned Margarine Frosting which mixed up nicely. I used the margarine frosting on the belly, snout and inner ears.

Decorating the Teddy Bear Cake

I piped the coloured buttercream frosting in place first, using a closed star frosting tip. I made up and down motions to put little “flowers” of fur. My metal tip was a bit bent, and with two of the tines on the star tip touching, which gave an interesting effect.

I barely had enough icing to cover the cake, phew! That worked out. I used the margarine frosting next on the snout and ears.

I had a random tube of black ready-to-use decorating icing from Cake Mate in my cupboard, so I used that to make the eyes, nose and mouth. To give some life to the eyes, I added a few round sprinkles as a glimmer of shine.

For the feet, I used chocolates (specifically Reese’s Cups and Aero Minis) to suggest paw pads and toe beans. Thinking of it now, I probably should have made paw prints on the upper paws as well, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.

Here is how the cake turned out once I finished adding the frosting:

Of course, the birthday girl wanted to help too! I armed her with some sprinkles and she went to down adding her finishing touches.

And here is the final final result!

Happy Third Birthday, Little Abby! She was so pleased with her teddy bear birthday cake!