Critter of the Week Bake-Off - the contenders

Ruth Guthrie's Mokohinau Islands Stag Beetle cake is made from chocolate cake, vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream and chocolate, it has iceplant leaves and flowers made from sugar/gumpaste

Nancy Collis made a cake of one of her favourite species a Powelliphanta, made from vanilla cake, homemade marzipan and buttercream.

Tardigrade by Lucerne

Devon Nicholls made a nesting fairy tern (NZ's most endangered endemic bird)

Jasmin Hollister and her friend Alex are 11 and 12 and also made a powelliphanta cake

Jasmin and Alex's powelliphanta cake

Hazel & Evelyn's entry: kawakawa leaves, flowers, and the kawakawa looper caterpillar

Hazel & Evelyn with their entry

Madeleine Gibson's submission is the Zealandia weasel!

10 yo Mary Brown's powelliphanta cake

Alice McCullagh's Powelliphanta

Catherine Field-Dodgson & her 5 year old daughter Poppy Wilkinson made this titiwai/glow worm cake

Titiwai cake at night

10 year old Kate baked this short tailed bat cake

Sharyn Gibson's tuatara cake

Dakota and her Grandma Robyn Rickards created this male tree weta

Ela & Marie Gale made this Puriri moth vegan lemon cake with green candy floss and cocoa butter wings decorated with coloured icing sugar

Wetapunga by Ash

Sophie is a critter of the week fan. She decorated her own 7th birthday cake featuring kiwi, ruru, and giant earthworm

Cicada cake by Sabine Barratt

By Robin Hodge and her two granddaughters

Jenna's long fin tuna cake

Emily Hunter's son wants to be an entymologist, so she made him this Mumu Chafer (beetle) cake for his 9th birthday

NZ Short Tailed Stingray and some Bladder Kelp by Hope Jackson, Michelle Marraffini, Rachel Hart and Lauren Roberts

A native giant slug orange cake on jelly grass and flake chocolate bark by Zana and Nico Solodi

Mark Disbury's Octopus Cake

Mandy Tocher's gecko cake

Praying mantis by Ashleigh (and Frances)

Fuligo septica also known as Dog Vomit Slime Mold by Aaron

Isobel and Dad's cutter cake. A Punga log with a weta poking out, a striped gecko and cabbage tree moth.

Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (1) an adult kiwi

Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (2) another adult kiwi

Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (3) a baby kiwi

Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (4) kakapo

11 year old Maya baked a Maui dolphin cake

Great White Shark by 9 year old Taman Mladenov

Great White Shark by 9 year old Taman Mladenov

Tui by Kate Bowden

Mary Whitehouse's endangered Kokako cake

By Samantha Key

Ruru by Hayley

The Royal Albatross Society made a life size Albatross cake. "We've just named it Lance after Lance Richdale, pioneer Albatross colonist 80 year anniversary of 1st chick fledge 1938"

Nicole Haerewa's Mokohinau stag beetle

Ruth Korver and Miriam Bowden's four spined Weevil cake

close up of the four spined Weevil cake

Ruth Korver's son Red and the insect cakes he made of lady bugs which aren't native but he was pretty adamant that they were his favourite insect and he wanted to make a cake of it.

Tiri Ferguson's "tiny critters on a cake"

12 year old Martina Tapia's maui dolphin cake

Peripatus/ngaokeoke by Mark @whai_i_te_hau