A friend of mine is going to a baby shower later this month and the mom-to-be is a pastry chef. How exciting! She asked me to make her a felt cake where the future kid could decorate it. A challenge, I love it. I poked around on Etsy to get some ideas. It took a bit of trial and error, but I did finally figure out how to make the icing.
I was really happy with the final product! Here it is in the strawberry version. Baby-to-be is a boy so I went with red icing instead of pink.
I sewed velcro onto the back of the individual pieces of icing so that they could be changed out. I remember vividly standing in the velcro section of Hobby Lobby trying to decide between adhesive backed or sew on velcro. It didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time so I went with the adhesive backed even though I planned to sew it on. What’s the harm in a bit of extra adhesive, I thought? What’s the harm indeed. It just gunked up my needle and made a few holes in my thumb. Never again. Of course I was way too cheap and lazy to go back and buy some more.
Here’s the cake switched over to the chocolate icing. The pointy velcro half will stick to felt all on it’s own, but I ended up sewing the soft velcro half onto the cake anyway so that the cake wouldn’t get torn up over time.
The night before I was to hand over the finished cake I got the brilliant idea to make a piping bag. These things always sound like a good idea in my head… I figured out the bag without much trouble, it’s not much different shape wise from a carrot after all, but the icing proved a challenge. I wanted future-tot to be able to change the colors of the icing, but I was stymied on how to make that happen. I finally decided to try out some hand felting with wool roving. Oh dear. Nothing like trying to learn a new skill in the 11th hour. I ended up with a few more holes in my finger before throwing in the towel. Maybe it’s time for a thimble?
Do you see the brown icing? Yeah, when it’s in the bag it’s not so bad. In fact, it looks a lot like icing. The problem is when you go to change the colors…
Um, yeah. It looks like poop and I mean that quite literally. It actually looks worse in person. I know you’re thinking that there’s no way that it can look any worse. Let me assure you that it does.
In the end, I showed my friend the options and while she liked the concept of changing the icing, she agreed that it looked like poop. I ended up just stitching up the piping bag. Much better.
I wanted to take some more pictures, but as those of you who know me can attest, I am a chronic procrastinator. I gave my friend the cake yesterday at our weekly playgroup so I took some pictures while the kids were climbing on the death trap playscape. There’s Kate in the blue. She’s fearless.