The Cake Purse

Let's take a break from all these Ratatouille posts (Don't worry, Part 2 for Remy will be up soon, I'm just tired of reading "Ratatouille" over and over again. And his arm kind of fell off, so yeaaaa)

Created by Sugar Craft

Look at this beauty! I've been seeing lots of these little guys around lately, and I've been itching to try one. So, this is my first attempt at making a cake purse.

First things first, bake a cake. I made a simple, round, yellow cake. Then I cling wrapped and froze it. After taking it out and letting it thaw, I cut a small portion of it out. Just enough so the cake could stand on its side and look sorta purse shaped. Like so:

But this isn't the cake I'm writing this post about (I made two purse cakes, this one just isn't ready yet. But I forgot to take a picture of the actual one)

This cake is already iced, or, in better words, ganached. Most of my cakes (okay, fine. All of them until these two) are iced using buttercream, but as I was reading another blog (I forgot which one it was, or else I'd link it here), and the blogger said that ganache makes a better undercoat for fondant than buttercream, and I really really wanted to find out if that's true (because I LOVE ganache. It's delicious!). So this cake is a double whammy for me. First attempt at a cake purse and first attempt at a ganache-fondant cake. All because someone asked me for a Magikarp cake and didn't follow through. And since I had already baked the cake, I couldn't let all that yumminess go to waste now could I? I decided to use it as a test subject for my cake ventures. What was that about a double whammy? I meant a triple whammy (; Three birds with one stone!

Anyways, onto the actual cake. Here's a picture of the shape of the actual cake purse I'm making:

It's still a round cake, except I cut the bottom part, the top, and the sides to give the cake this trapezoid shape. As you can see, the fondant is already on the cake. From this point on it was just smoothing the fondant on the cake until it was smooth, then I came along with the pizza cutter to get rid of the extra fondant at the bottom.

I promise that it's the same cake and fondant! The lighting just kinda makes it look different. I need to find a place to always take the picture at... Bear with me, I'll get better at this step by step thing as we go along... Probably, hopefully.

Well, as I was saying. Now that we have the outer fondant nice and pretty looking, we can start making the purse. We already have the base, now we need the details.

First I went along with one of the tools (this one that looks like a teeny tiny pizza cutter on one end, and a pizza cutter with ridges on the other end. I used the ridges for this part of the details). I went along on all corners of the cake to create a "seam" along the edges. You can't see it very well on this picture because a very small and slight detail. Only to accent, not overwhelm. So if you have a heavy hand, I'd hold out on this part.

Next is the zipper part of the purse. For this part, I had NO idea what I was gonna do. I was about to just skip the zipper altogether and find something else to do, when a little lightbulb went off. I love lightbulbs, don't you? They brighten up my day (: And this lightbulb was a golden one, in the shape of my bracelet. But of course, putting fondant on top of my bracelet would be gross. So I called up my best friend, and cling wrapped that sucker. Then I rolled a strip of fondant over the bracelet to get this pretty design:

I did this to two strips. The first one trimmed the edges and placed it on top of the cake, creating the zipper effect. The second one I trimmed, then cut in half, so I had two lines of the impression. I used those to wrap around on the bottom of the cake. You always need something around the border of the cake to hide the imperfections.

Next was the handle. This was made by rolling a log of fondant into a length that looked appropriate of the cake. Then to create the curve I went ahead and cling wrapped it onto a bottle of honey* and left it drying over night.**

But of course, a purse with just a handle and seams is pretty boring. So what do we do?? I can't have a boring purse!!! 

So, let's put some flowers on it! This lovely creation here is a fondant rose (: After the fondant on the cake is done drying, this little guy goes in the center of the purse. Like so,

But a cake all by itself looks rather lonely. So it needs a pretty platform, like this one

This is just a cake board. And because cake boards all on their own look rather ugly, a good technique is to cover them with fondant. Not a lot of fondant now, just enough to cover the board. Then come along the edge with a very small ribbon tho make the sides of the board look nice. A pretty cake can very well be ruined by an ugly board, so don't consider this step of the process any less important.

But still... That board looks pretty empty to me. So to give the purse some company I decided to add a little beauty to the mix.

But, just to keep you on your toes, I won't include the tutorial for the shoes on this post (; So stay tuned and the How-To on the fondant shoe will be up soon (:

*For the sole purpose of its shape, not for the honey or anything. It was very tightly closed.
**For the fondant to dry and not just stay preserved, the cling wrap had to let air inside, so not too tight.