Crafty Friday: Fake Cakes

My kids have more fun preparing meals of fake food for me, mixing concoctions of grass, leaves and water to make “Trixie food,” and even cooking pots of stew consisting of fabric and felt scraps. Needless to say, fake food is big in our household. Thus, we’re using up the collection of cylindrical containers we’ve amassed in our pantry and creating beautiful, tiered fake cakes.

Here’s what you need:

-small boxes or cylindrical containers (i.e. salt or oatmeal containers) in different sizes
-construction or scrapbook paper or felt
-scissors
-glue and tape
embellishments:
-stickers
-buttons
-ribbon
-lace
-old jewelry or beads

Step 1: Gather your boxes or cylinders and figure out the order in which you want them to be stacked. If you need to, cut them to a size suitable for the cake. For example, our oatmeal containers were too tall, so we cut them in half to get a proportionate layer for the tiered cake.

Step 2: Wrap each cake layer with paper or felt and secure with glue. For the tops of each layer, trace the shape of your cake onto the paper, cut out the shape, and attach it with glue.

Step 3: Start embellishing each layer. You can use ribbon or lace to wrap the layers and mimic decorative icing techniques. Buttons can act as candies, or the cherry on top. Just a side note, Finn carried his cake off to go play with it before it was embellished. It took an act of congress to get him to bring it back and decorate it. I’d say that’s a good sign for this project.

Step 4: Once you’re finished embellishing your cake, stack the layers, grab a plate, and start “eating.” You can create extra layers to let the kids mix and match the cake layers.

Happy Crafting!

nessa dee