(Not quite Mickey) Mouse Birthday Cake

I decided to make this cake for my niece´s third birthday, based on a cake in my Tartas de Fiesta Infantiles recipe book by Anne Wilson, as she really likes Mickey Mouse and although it´s not quite Mickey, it´s near enough!! I made a plain White sponge cake, following a recipe taken from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. I then made a simple buttercream to which I added red food colouring to 1/3 cup (although I couldn´t get it to turn out a red colour no matter how much food colouring I added and instead ended up with a dark pink/purpley colour!) and yellow food colouring to the remaining buttercream.

I then covered the top of the cake with the yellow buttercream and then with a chocolate icing pen I had, I piped the outline of the face, the eyes, mouth and eyebrows. I then used chocolate hundreds and thousands/sprinkles to fill in the hairline. Not an easy job as they tended to fall wherever, not where you wanted them to fall! Using a piping bag, I outlined the mouth with the red buttercream and then coloured in the mouth. I then completed the face with large jelly beans for the eyes ( looking back really I think they were too big for the irises!), a marshmellow for the cheek and a blackberry sweet for the nose. The ears were a bit tricky to assemble too. I used 3 digestive biscuits for each ear,which I tried to stick together using the chocolate icing. I also tried to stick a toothpick between the biscuits which I then inserted into the cake, which didn´t work too badly but not as well as I had hoped!