My little boy is turning one next month and I'm finally getting some ideas together for his cake.

I'm going to make a gift box wtih a bow and, next to it, I want to have a teddy bear made from cake. It'd be fun to have the bear standing but I need help wtih the support system. My guess is I could screw two dowels in to the board and do little rings of cake around it for the legs. I know I'll have to put some other type of board down on top of the dowels to support the cake body. What's the best way to do that?

Finally, how do you go about getting the arms to stay put once you've put them on? I'm thinking of either doing RKT covered in fondant or modeling chocolate covered in fondant.

Any ideas? I could make him sitting but what fun would that be?

You can always make a teddy bear cake using the mini stand up pan from Wilton. A link is below -
http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?id=3E314219-475A-BAC0-5851D8085A5AE819&killnav=1
Michaels or Hobby Lobby usually has a coupon to use. HTH.

Sorry, didn't fully read your post!

The support system you described sounds good. You could also make his legs from RKT.

The cake you described sounded similar to an Elmo cake I've seen. Here's a link to the cake with instructions on how they made it. http://www.zerogravity.com.au/blog/2009/01/how-i-made-an-elmo-cake-part-1/

Thanks for the link. My head is swimming while trying to do the conversions. LOL! I'm surprised that more support wasn't needed in the body.