How to Make a Teddy Bear Cake

Make a 10×15 cake. A 9×13 is fine if you don’t have a 10×15 pan–it will just be a little smaller. Also make buttercream icing, mostly chocolate, but reserve about 1/3 for other colors for the teddy bear’s clothes.

You can see the lines from my cooling rack. They actually helped me to cut it evenly on each side. I cut the hands about halfway down.

Cut out the teddy bear shape. The book I was following mentioned a template; but I couldn’t find it, so I just eyeballed it. You can lightly trace the shape with a toothpick first to make sure it’s correctly proportioned.

Ice the bear’s face, arms, and legs with brown icing.

Ice brown head, arms, feet, and bit of chest.

Ice the top of the dress with pink icing and the skirt with purple icing.

Ice top part of dress. I also iced a thin layer of purple for under the star pattern skirt.

Cut out a flat, circular shape from one of the cake’s cutoffs. Stick it onto the face to form the teddy bear’s nose, and ice it with brown icing.

Use candy to decorate. You can use M&Ms for the paws, ears, and eyes. Licorice strips can be eyebrows (or black icing). Or just forget the eyebrows, if you can’t find licorice.

Decorate the dress with icing or other pastel-colored candy.

I tried to make it look like button accessories on the jumper.

Decorate around the edges of the teddy bear and around the nose with brown M&Ms or chocolate chips. Crush wafer cookies and sprinkle them onto the brown parts of the teddy to look like fur, and sprinkle caramel or chocolate vermicelli onto the nose.

Sprinkle coconut around the teddy and sprinkle extra sweets onto the coconut.

Comments or Modifications:

For brown icing, I just add cocoa to buttercream icing to make it chocolate, instead of buying brown food coloring.

You can put the year of their birthday in icing or sweets on the front of her dress if you like.

I usually don’t do the coconut decorations on the cake board.

I outlined the bear in black icing, and the dress in green. I thought it made it stand out more.

I know a bear should have brown eyes, but my package of our version of M&Ms over here didn’t have many brown pieces; so I used blue, as our little girl has blue-green eyes. Then I used the mauve pieces for the rest of the paws.

The picture I looked at used only candy to decorate the entire dress, but that was too much sugar for us. That’s why I used icing for much of the dress and cut the sweets down.

And don’t forget my tip from How to Make a Boat Cake on how to ice the cut edges of the cake! It really helps to freeze the cake after cutting the teddy bear shape. Then heat the frosting just a bit (not too much, or it will melt! Then you won’t be able to do the star tip, as it will be too soft.) It will go on much easier without pulling the soft cake into bits. I didn’t have time to freeze the cake thoroughly; but just making sure it was entirely cool helped.

And that’s how she feels about it! 🙂

You can make a boy version by cutting off the skirt portion to make the legs straight. Mine turned out more like a basketball jersey, though I was trying for an “overalls” look. I used solely candy and chocolate chips to decorate him.

Boy version with number on it.