Gumball Machine Cake Topper (Cookie Art Club Premium Tutorial)

Olive is 3 years old! When I was writing a post on Instagram about her birthday party, I had to stop and think, wait is she 2 or 3? She’s 3??? Wow. Anyway, this year for Olive’s THIRD birthday, she wanted a gumball machine cake (well at first she said she wanted a bowling alley on top of her cake but I’m not that skilled). She’s still a bit young for gumballs, so I made her the next best thing: a gumball machine cake!

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You can see Olive’s first birthday pastel galaxy birthday cake here and her second birthday Daniel Tiger birthday cake here. I always have such a blast making these for her!

This year was a little different because now we have baby Sidney which makes it harder to find time to bake on the weekends. But I strapped little Sid to my chest in her Ergo Baby and went to work! She only lasted about 20 minutes before getting fussy and then I handed her off to dad (fortunately he was home during the birthday cake chaos). You can see a time-lapse video of me filling and frosting this cake with my little helpers here on Instagram.

Since cookies are my specialty, I made a giant gumball machine cookie topper to complete the gumball theme on this cake. I used my cookie pop technique to hold it in place. The small gumballs inside the machine are royal icing transfers (watch the video to see how I made them). And for the cupcakes, I made small round gumball cookies to go on top of each one.

The bright colors on the cookies and cake came from the Wilton Color Right set and I used this nifty cake comb to make the stripes (it took a while to get it right but now that I know how to use it I’m in love with it). See below for the full list of supplies and recipes.

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Here are the supplies I used to make this Gumball Machine Cake

• Homemade Yellow Cake Mix from I Am Baker
• Vanilla pudding for the filling (I used a boxed mix and added half & half instead of milk. I added 3/4 the amount of liquid that is called for to make it extra thick. It was so good, I will only make it like this from now on!)
• Crumbled Biscoff cookies for the filling
• American Buttercream Frosting from I Am Baker
• 8″ cake board
• Blue & yellow food coloring to make teal frosting
• Cake comb
• Decorating bags
• 1M star decorating tip
• Large round decorating tip
• Large offset spatula for frosting the cake
• Gumball Machine Cookie Topper (see tutorial below)
• Rainbow sprinkles

I also made these delicious sprinkle sugar cookies for the dessert spread.

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Happy Birthday, Olive!

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Click on the images below to see Olive’s birthday cakes from past years.

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