Panda Candy Chocolate Cake

Kids will love this panda candy-themed birthday cake.

It is made of a delicious chocolate cake and chocolate frosting. It has bamboo-looking cookies all around it and is topped with splatters of chocolate, pandas, and candy accents.

My daughter and I made this chocolate candy panda cake for her Panda Candy Birthday Party.

We had a lot of fun making it together.

How to Make this Panda Candy Chocolate Cake

Continue reading and/or watch the video to see a tutorial on how we made this.

1- Bake four 9″ round chocolate cakes. I have an excellent recipe I’ve linked to below. Cut the wax paper to fit neatly in the bottom of the pans. Do not shove it in like I experimented with for two of the pans (you can see the results in the video); lesson learned always cut wax paper to the size and shape of the bottom of the pan.

2- This cake is very moist and delicate so before frosting it, refrigerate or freeze it until it is very cool.

3- Make the chocolate icing. If you are using my recipe double the recipe and set 1/4 to the side for a crumb coat.

4- Put a little bit of icing down on a cake turn table. Set one layer of cake on it, using frosting in a piping bag pipe a layer of icing all over the layer and gently smooth it. This cake is delicate but so delicious, you just need to be gentle when icing it.

5- Set the second layer of cake on the first, using frosting in a piping bag pipe a layer of icing all over the layer and gently smooth it.

6- Set the third layer of cake on the second, using frosting in a piping bag pipe a layer of icing all over the layer and gently smooth it.

7- Make a crumb coat by putting 1/4 of the icing in an icing bag and microwave it for 20-40 seconds to soften it and create a crumb coat.

8- While it’s still warm, pipe it onto the sides of the cake and top of the cake and smooth it.

9- Cool the cake in the fridge until the crumb coat has hardened.

10- Ice the cake again.

11- Place the Pirouette cookies around the edges of the cake and snap them into different lengths to create a variety of heights.

12- Wait until you are done with step 18 to set the panda figurines onto the cake.

13- Take a white chocolate bar and snap off an edge to look like it has had a bite taken out of it.

14- There should be an extra cake. Put a portion of it in a waffle ice cream cone and make it look like a scoop of chocolate icing.

Prop up the ice cream cone by using a piece of Pirouette cookie stuck in the cake. Set the cone at an angle so the end is sticking up.

15- Stick strawberry Pocky sticks and old fashion suckers around the cake.

16- Sprinkle Very Berry Nerd Clusters, pastel-colored salt water taffy, Smarties, and Jelly Belly’s around sparingly on top of the cake.

17- Melt a small section of white chocolate in a different bowl for each color you want to splatter the cake with. Microwave (stir every 5-10 seconds) and color the chocolate with pastel food colors: teal/aqua, yellow, pink, purple, and if desired white and blue.

18. Using a fork, dip the fork prongs into the melted chocolate and while holding the prongs down over the cake flick your wrist back and forth to splatter the cake with pastel-colored chocolate.

19. Place the panda figurines on the cake. You can use melted white chocolate as glue if they won’t stay on their own.

This is how we placed our pandas.