How To Make A Bunny Shaped Cake for Easter
Thoughts of Easter bring back sweet memories including our homemade Easter Bunny Cake! Looking at these old pictures of those cakes is nostalgic.
You can make a super cute Bunny-shaped cake with two 8″ cake layers. Then decorate it any way you like with or without coconut.
My family first started making the Easter Bunny cake sometime back in the late 1970’s. It seems to me that my Mom saw it in a magazine and made the first one. I am sharing some old photos of a few of the cakes we made and decorated through the years.
I spent too long digging through old photographs to find these old pictures of our Easter Bunny cakes from yesteryear.
Long before Pinterest existed we found fun ideas in magazines such as Woman’s Day, Family Circle, or Southern Living. Pinterest has served to expedite domestic ideas through the use of the internet. Recently, the Easter Bunny cake has made a ‘comeback’ on Pinterest. Have you seen them?
We almost always gave our Easter Bunny Cake a bowtie. He is decorated with colored coconut, jelly beans, licorice sticks, and those marshmallow peeps the children claimed first.
Fast forward to 2012. My oldest daughter is all grown up, married and the mother to 5 wonderful children. Four of them are watching and licking their lips as she carries on the family tradition of the Easter Bunny Cake.
My daughter decided to leave the bowtie off her Easter Bunny cake. I really like the way the nose and mouth are done too. It is a nice new look for our old family tradition Easter Bunny Cake.
Supplies
- Two 8″ round baked cake layers
- Frosting in your color of choice
- Coconut is you want to decorate with coconut
- Food coloring to tint the coconut, if using
- Pastel M&M candies if you prefer not to use coconut
- Pastel jelly beans, if decorating with coconut
- Thin red licorice sticks like Red Vines for nose and mouth
- Foam board to put the cake on, you can get a piece of foam board at Dollar Tree
- Aluminum foil to cover the foam board
- Peeps chicks to decorate around the cake, if desired
How To Make The Easter Bunny Cake
- Bake a two-layer cake using 8″ round cake pans and allow it to completely cool. You can use any flavor of your choice. Do not frost yet.
- Cove a large foam board with aluminum foil to set your cake on.
- Cut one of the round cake layers exactly as the template above shows. When you cut the ears, the centerpiece that remains will be the bowtie. If you do not want the bowtie, simply cut your ears larger.
- Now, place the uncut cake layer on the foil-covered foam board to be the bunny’s head. Place each ear at an angle near the top. Then place the bowtie under his chin.
- Frost your cake with either homemade or store-bought frosting. Frost the cake all over including the sides.
6. Time to decorate!
Pro Tip
Freeze the cake before frosting it. This will help the frosting go on smoothly without picking up cake crumbs in the frosting.
Decorating without coconut
First
Place your cakes onto the foil-covered foam board. Frost the cake all over, including the sides.
Next
Decorate the bowtie in any pattern of color you like using the pastel M&M’s candies.
Make the nose and eyes
Using the M&M candies in your choice of colors, make the nose and eyes. We will add the Red Vines to finish off his face.
Decorate the bunny ears
Use M&M’s in your choice of colors to decorate inside the bunny ears.
Red Vines make the face
Cut Red Vines to finish the bunny face. You can make whiskers, a mouth, and small eyebrows using Red Vines candy.
Decorating with coconut
If you are using coconut, you will want to tint the coconut using the food coloring. You have choices. You can leave most of the coconut white for a white bunny and only tint the bowtie and inside the ears if you like.
If you are tinting the coconut in different colors, use small bowls. Add the desired amount of coconut to a small bowl. Squeeze a couple of drops of food coloring in the bowl and stir with a spoon until your desired color is reached. Repeat this process for each color.
Add the tinted coconut to your cake, gently pressing it down. Then decorate using jelly beans and Red Vines to make the eyes, nose, and mouth.
More Ways To Celebrate Easter
Happy Easter to you and your family.
Please remember that Christ died for you. Easter is a celebration of Christ’s resurrection and our redemption.
What a great story! I love that you have these old photos. My mom wasn’t much of a decorative cake kind of lady so we usually were given a plain chocolate cake with cherries and a can of spray whipping cream!
I love traditions. This one is so special! To see your cakes…I just dropped my Mac in the middle of this. Sorry! the screen its cracked. I have to go
What a fun family tradition! I should totally start something like this since my kids love anything to do with food in general…lol.
I love this post! My Mom used to make an Easter bunny cake every year, I totally forgot how much I loved that until now! I’m definitely going to start up this tradition with my kids.
This was a fun trip down your family’s Easter Memory Lane – thank you for sharing it with us. I don’t remember that we ever had Easter Bunny cakes–and now I am feeling like I missed out !! This was great inspiration for when-or-if I have grandlittles!!
My grandmother used to make a bunny cake before she passed away! I hadn’t thought about that in a while – thanks for the memories! Hope you had a wonderful Easter!
I forgot to mention – what a huge Easter meal!!! Wish I could have some of that good stuff:)
It does seem huge but that is only because everyone brings their choice of dishes. That is why they all bring their ‘to-go’ dishes also, to share 🙂
I love all the memories Shirley! Love the cakes and the great tradition it holds for your family. You are so correct about the digital images we have these days and Pinterest power! BTW: LOL about the wall paper!
Wasn’t that wall paper something else! Wow how the times change our likes 🙂 I enjoyed reflecting on those bunny cakes and the memories of family traditions.
Thanks for bringing back so many good memories of that bunny cake! Are you sure we’re not related? Your Easter menu looks a lot like my mom’s.
And tell your daughter that she did a magnificent job on that cake. It’s almost too pretty to cut! Happy Easter!!!
Thanks, Alli. Sometimes I think you and I were cut from the same cloth and sent to two different families. It’s funny! Back in the old days, my Mom would have cooked all that afood herself. Now we all contribute. It makes the load lighter and let’s everyone be involved.