Purse cake… without the cake

Last night in my Advanced Cake Decorating class, we finished up our purse cakes.  However, these “cakes” don’t actually contain any cake.  Since this class is mainly devoted to decorating cakes, we don’t focus on making cakes.  Just decorating them!  We molded the base out of fondant and decorated it with fondant and gum paste.  There’s not much difference between fondant and gum paste and both can be used as decorations on cakes.  Fondant is better to cover cakes and gum paste is better for smaller decorations since it can be rolled much thinner.  We had two weeks of class time to finish these cakes.  The first week I got most of it finished and just had the little decorations to do during the second week. 

We were given a few options of purses to choose from and I chose the Chanel clutch purse.  I found it extremely adorable and was so excited to see how it turned out.  Here is a picture of the purse after week 1.

Week 2 was devoted to finishing up the little decorations on the cake, such as the logo, and the purse contents.  I brought in a lipstick, a tube of mascara and my compact mirror (that my sister made for me) to use as my inspiration.  I’m especially proud of how the tube of mascara turned out.  I felt it was pretty recognizable without the writing on the side, but of course that’s only a woman’s perspective.  I chose to add the writing so that even men could recognize what it was.  I used a skewer and black coloring mixed with almond extract (to thin it out a bit) to write the text.  Let me tell you, writing with a thin skewer is NOT the easiest thing in the world!  It took a lot of practice before I felt confident enough to write on the mascara tube.

My class put our cakes in the Kendall College dining room display case for everyone to enjoy.  However, I do plan on taking it home in the next few weeks to display proudly in my living room.  As much as I would have loved to create a purse cake with actual cake, I’ll be able to keep this “cake” forever since nothing in it will spoil!

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