Monday, October 19, 2015

Doll Size Bat Cake for Halloween


This week I am showing you how to make a bat cake for the dolls. For those of you that also follow my dollhouse scale tutorials this will be a little bit familiar. I did a similar cake over there last week.



I just love this bat cake and have been making it in dollhouse scale for many years. I wanted to adapt it to the larger 18” dolls this year also. In the smaller scale I use a polymer clay base but I wanted to go a different route for this scale. I felt it would be a lot of wasted clay to make a cake this size when you will never see the inside. So I started thinking about alternatives to the clay. I thought of and discounted several options but I kept coming back to the Styrofoam base. I felt it was inexpensive and light weight as well as easy to work with.

My local Joann's didn't have a huge selection of Styrofoam to choose from but they did have something that would work. I was able to find a sheet that is 15/16” thick and the sheet measures 11 15/16” by 17 15/16” so let's just round that all up to 1” thick and 12” by 18” just to make this not hurt our brains. The cost of the sheet was around $6 or $7 and I did have a 40% off coupon to use.

Before I started the video I used a 3” cookie cutter (from the kitchen) to cut 2 circles (cake layers) and on camera I cut one of those in half. I then used my 1 ½” round clay cutter to give that straight cut edge some shape to look like a bat wing.
So far this is really easy isn't it?? Don't worry it doesn't get much harder the rest of the project.

Now we need to frost our “cake layers” I love the way latex caulking looks just like frosting and it is so easy to color with acrylic paint. I do prefer to use the paint in the tubes over the bottles of craft paint simply because it doesn't dilute the paint as much. I used mostly Burnt Umber with just a bit of Raw Umber to make it a bit darker. The paints I used today are just the cheap ones from Joann's. Don't worry if you don't get your “frosting” as dark as you want it we are going to paint over it after we get the cake layers all frosted. The color we add now is just make it easier to get a rich chocolate brown later. We could leave it white and just paint it but it will be harder to get it dark enough and any place that you either miss in the painting or that gets chipped later will show. This way those mistakes won't haunt us later.

On this scale I like to frost the sides of the pieces then let that dry and then frost the tops. It is so much easier this way because you have a dry place to hold onto while you are frosting.

Since the Styrofoam has so much texture and is also sooo porous you might as well plan on putting on 2 coats of the frosting mixture. Even after the two coats I still had a few spots that were showing the texture underneath.

Don't worry that the color of these coats of frosting isn't even we are now going to give our cake a top coat of the chocolate color paint. When this dries we will be left with a cake that looks like it was frosted with some rich yummy chocolate frosting.

For the base I used a piece of foamcore that was left from another project. I always have foamcore left over so it was easy. Use whatever you have a piece of cardboard from a cardboard box or even some of the paper board that we use from food type boxes (I would use 2 layers of this though) I cut mine 5” by 10” to give a generous serving board. You can make yours whatever size works best for you. Now cover your board with some aluminum foil to make it look like a real serving board under a cake.

Now the fun part let's add some decorating to this bat. I love to use Scribbles 3_D fabric paint whenever I need the look of decorator's icing. It works great and is inexpensive. I used the hot chocolate and winter white colors. I got to thinking after I had finished the cake that it would have been really cute to use some of our marshmallows we made for the s'mores as eyes for our bat. Maybe next year.



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