A Looney Easter Cake

Bugs Bunny Does Double Duty as the Easter Rabbit

When I was a kid, character-shaped cake pans were all the rage. The cake section of every grocery store always had at least five or six of these pans to choose from. Sure, any mom could bake a rectangular cake, slap some sugar icing on top and stick some Hot Wheels and candles directly into the sea of icing… but getting a cake shaped like a car? Or Darth Vader? Or Bugs Bunny? That was something that would keep the neighborhood kids talking for years months days hours minutes!

My mom was a pretty good cake decorator and didn’t need any help in the cake decorating department, but for those who did these pans were a simple way to bake a cake in the shape of a recognizable character.

When you purchase these pans new they come with an insert that shows you, at least theoretically, how the cake should be decorated. The insert is helpful in many ways. Not only does it give you a general idea how to decorate the cake, but you can easily tell things like how many colors of icing you’ll need. You can also use it to show people what the cake was supposed to look like when you’re all done.

Therein lies the fault in the pans; the inserts are the first thing to go in the trash. Nobody wants a Tweety Bird birthday cake seven years in a row and so after only one or two uses, these pans would end up in garage sales or swapped amongst neighbors… without the inserts. And yeah, I know it looks like there’s a lot of detail in that pan and that following those contoured lines would be simple when the cake comes out of the oven… but it’s not. Suddenly, the cake becomes a color-by-numbers puzzle with no lines. Or numbers.

When I was a kid we would see pans like this at every garage sale for a quarter, but somewhere along the way like everything else from my childhood, they became collectible. Today $10 would be a great price. In antique malls I’ve seen them priced at $20-$25, so when I stumbled across a vintage 1978 Bugs Bunny cake pan for $5 at a garage sale, I snatched it up.

The unique shapes of these pans (no two models are alike) makes them a pain to store in your kitchen cabinet. They don’t stack easily and seem to actively repel other pots and pans. A few years ago my wife finally said I needed to either use the pan or get rid of it and with Easter just around the corner I was inspired to make a Bugs Bunny Easter Cake.

The key to decorating these things is using a star-tipped icing bag and painstakingly dotting it over (and over and over) until the entire cake is covered. Some people ice the entire cake before beginning which ensures icing coverage but makes any remaining raised guidelines on the cake impossible to follow.

Everybody who saw my cake recognized it as Bugs Bunny. Also, I told everyone that only people who said it looked like Bugs Bunny got a piece of cake. People are easily persuaded by free cake.

Lord knows I already collect enough things and, not wanting to start a cake pan collection, I asked around on Facebook if any of my friends wanted it. It was there someone informed me that many local libraries accept and loan cake pans! Who knew? I checked with our local library and, sure enough, they said they would be happy to accept my Bugs Bunny pan. Sure, I could have made a few bucks by flipping it, but the idea of someone else checking the pan out from the library and getting to make their own cake was too cool to resist.

Also I put a note on the pan that said anyone who uses it owes me a piece of cake.