::caterpillar cake::

This was Max's one year old cake. The head section worked perfectly as a baby's SMASH cake

how to use the sphere cake mold

*Spray twice as much Pam on the pans as you think you need. They stick like crazy.
*Takes 1.5 cake mixes to fill the two pans completely
I gently dump the half sphere onto the counter and cut off the bulging cooked top to make the top flat. I use my cake leveler to do this, but a long knife would do it
*Next I cut about one inch off the bottom section of all balls to make it sit flat on the decorating surface
~Had my husband cut plywood and wrapped it in tinfoil
*Place strips of paper towel under the edges of the cake
~So if you get crazy with the icing it just disappears with the paper towel strips when you pull them out at the end of the decorating
*Ice the flat top off the base and place the already cut second half onto it make the full sphere

**If you have time to place these spheres in the fridge overnight, or freezer for 2-4 hours, you will have a much more solid ball to work with. This helps with the stability of it, and keeps crumbs from getting in the visible coat of icing**

how to hold them together

*I over engineered this because I knew I wanted it to live thru the car ride
*The tail was iced and decorated and then I put two bamboo kabob skewers about half way thru it and sticking out toward the future front
*The yellow section was mostly iced, i left off the icing on the sections that would not show, so that I could touch it and move it. Then I slid it on the tail piece skewers to secure it to the tail. Last of all I added two skewers to it to add the next section to the line up.
*Repeat to attach the orange section and the blue section, but leave the front skewers off the blue section
*I had cut off the top and the bottom of the blue section to give the head a place to sit
*I cut four skewers to run from the plywood base, thru the blue section and almost sticking out of the top of the head
One actually did and I just covered it with icing

decorating

**I iced all the sections before putting them in place because I liked how it made the sections crisply defined from each other, if you didn’t care about that, or had they sections all the same color you could just line them up before icing then ice the whole body. That would make it TONS easier.**

*Ice and roll purple tail peice on plate of nerds
~Rolling was only method that worked for me but it was a mess
~I tried just sprinkling them on and it didn’t work on the sides
*Yellow section - I iced it and then I placed the Gummy Lifesavers after I attached it to the next piece to make sure I liked how they lined up
*Orange section - Ice and stick skittles all over it
~MESSY and slow/steady work
~If I had it to do over I would have put the S in on all the skittles, but lets not get too picky
*Blue section - Ice and place gummy candy
*Head - Ice and decorate with face, mine was VERY basic and I used a ziplock with a hole cut in it to draw the eyes and mouth
~I could have done more, but I was so sick of this cake by this point that I wanted to throw it. But I couldn’t lifted the darn thing anyway.
*The last touch was the dumdum sucker antennae

**Once the balls were baked the project took me about 1.5 hours to ice, put together and decorate. I only have one ball mold so it took me two days of baking off and on to make all the spheres. I had a ball in a state of cooking, freezing, or decorating for two days or so. **

Then I PRAYED the entire one hour drive to my in-laws house, which it survived, while crushing my lap. (After I made Josh carry it to the car)