My younger daughter regularly wakes up asking for a piece of cake for breakfast. Not that we would normally have a cake unless it’s somebody’s birthday but she asks anyway. So one day I just decided to make a fruit cake hat for each of my daughters. These hats very easy to make and lots of fun too, so have your kids help you! I made one strawberry cake covered in dark chocolate and one raspberry-blueberry-cherry cake covered in white chocolate.
I apologize about those different backgrounds of the photos but that’s just how things are just now with my three young kids. The thought of me having an hour to myself is a total sci-fi so when I make something I usually make it in the spare seconds.
Table of Contents
Supplies – Piece of Cake Hat
– cardboard
– scissors/cardboard cutter
– pencil
– matte spray vasnish
– paint (the best is acrylic but you can use any other as well)
– about 100 g of polymer clay
– a big flat brush
– smaller flat brush
– small round brushes
– glue gun
– paper masking take
– plate
– finger sponge (optional)
– sculpting tools or cake decorating tools
How to make the fruit cake hat
Cutting and Constructing
Use a flat plate as a template to trace and cut out a circle from the cardboard.
Cut out 3 cardboard rectangles – one 13 cm long, two 10 cm long, all of them 7 cm tall.
Make the longer piece round , this will be the back of the cake.
Glue the edges of all three rectangles together like in the picture to create a triangle with one round edge.
Trace this triangle on the cardboard, cut out the shape and glue it on the top of the triangle.
Glue the piece of cake onto the cardboard circle and cover all edges with masking tape.
Painting
Paint the plate of your cake hat with white acrylic paint (or spray it white) and the cake with any basic color you wish for your cake. If you don’t have acrylic paint, first spray the whole thing with mat varnish (light color). The reason for this is that if you use any paint that needs to be mixed with water, the water will make your cardboard wrinkle. If you spray it first, the paint and water won’t touch the cardboard.
Paint the buttercream – just make two lines with a smaller flat brush. For the strawberry cake I mixed some red and yellow and just a little white.
Paint the pastry part of the cake – or tap it with a brush or with a finger sponge. The tapping will give it more of a cake texture and I really recommend using the finger sponge if you have one. I mixed some brown with white and a bit of yellow. Paint also the top and back of the cake. Here I chose brown because it was supposed to be a chocolate cake.
Head Piece
For the head piece, measure the circumference of the head. Cut a cardboard stripe that is of that length and about 15 cm tall. The head piece needs to be quite tall because the hat doesn’t have the typical round shape inside and if you cut the head piece too short, it will be falling off our head.
Glue the edges together to form a circle. Now you need to shape the edge diagonally for the plate to sit diagonally on the head. I drew a line, cut it and then tried to put the plate (with the cake on it) and re-adjusted it several times.
When you’re happy with how the plate and the head piece fit together, glue them together.
Spray/paint the head piece.
Making the fruit
Raspberries
To make a raspberry, make several smaller balls from the polymer clay (4-6 mm) and one larger oval.
Cover the oval with the smaller balls and press them a little with your fingers.
Blueberries
For the blueberries, make balls from the polymer clay, flatten them a little to resemble the shape of a blueberry and then use a shart pointy tool to pinch a circle on one of the flat sides of each blueberry.
Cherry
Make a ball and form a hole to create and opening for the cherry stalk. Roll out a thin rope, cut it and shape it to make the stalk.
Strawberries
Form a strawberry-like shape with your fingers and press each one in your working mat because you want just half strawberries on your cake.
Roll out a thin rope, cut tiny pieces off it and place them on the strawberries as seeds,
Bake everything according to the instructions for the polymer clay you’re using. In my case that would be 30 minutes on 130 °C.
Painting the Fruit and Finishing the Cake Hat
I painted the blueberries with a mixture of dark blue and black.
For the cherry I used dark red and for the stem dark green.
I painted the raspberry with a mixture of red and white.
The strawberries are bright red and the seeds yellow.
Glue the fruit on top of the cake hat in any manner you like.
Spray varnish everything.
That’s it, that was a piece of cake, wasn’t it?
Are you looking for more costume ideas? Well, here they are!
