This is the last cake from the month of cake madness. This is Grug cake requested for a kids birthday party.

I doubt anyone not from Australia will have any clue who Grug is, and even a lot of the Australians amongst you may not remember him. I’d, admittedly, forgotten all about him until I was asked to do the cake. Grug is a character from a series of illustrated children’s books written by Ted Prior. Though there have been no new books published since I was a little kid, you can still find them amongst the kids book section of most any book store or supermarket.

Here’s what he looks like in the books:

Grug’s haystack-like appearance is due to his origins: he comes from a grass tree. It would have been simple just to cover him with fondant and indent stripes in it, but I wanted him to look really fluffy and fuzzy, so I used a sugar gun to pipe strings of fondant and attached them to the cake. Like usual I thought I would completely breeze through it, then wondered why I was still piping fondant 5 hours later. But the time spent was worth it.

Inside the cake is a stack of four mud cakes that I ganched together, carved into the shape of Grug, then covered with whipped chocolate ganache.

In most of the depictions of Grug you don’t see his arms, just his fingers poking out the bottom of his fur. It’s only when he’s holding things that you see his arms. I was asked to make Grug sitting down, so I left his fingers just protruding out from the side of his fur as he reclines amongst the grass.

His feet and legs, on the other hand, are always very prominent. I made the fur on his legs a bit thinner than his body fur. My favourite part was making his little toes.

Last of all I added a few edible rocks and flowers around Grug to complete his grassy scene.