Baby Cakes (Recycled Water Bottle Caps)

Tomorrow is the beginning of Lent.  I'm not Catholic, but I try to pick one thing to give up every year.  Knowing that millions of people around the world will be challenging themselves at the same time is great motivation.  This year, the vice that I chose to go without is candy.   I will be going 40 looong days and nights without sweets.

I have always had a love affair with candy: especially chewy, fruity things like Starbursts or fruit snacks.  I don't even take my vitamins unless they're the gummy kind.  Maybe for this reason, I was craving sugary snacks all morning at work.

I went into the studio, picked up this basket of bottle caps and thought about what I could make with them.  My head must be filled with sugar plum fairies today, because the first thought I had was about cake.  The plastic water bottle caps looked like they could be the right size to make miniature doll house sized cakes.  With acrylic paints, I 'frosted' them in several layers of chocolate and vanilla icing.




I picked out supplies that would be ideal for decorating mini cakes: tiny fake flowers, beads, glitter, paint and foam shapes.  Translucent plastic pellets from a sun catcher craft kit were used as sprinkles on the the sides of a few cakes.  The little eclairs with chocolate glaze (on the chocolate cakes) are made with leftover beads from my jewelry makeover post with some brown paint.

A hole punch is the perfect tool to transform colored foam into fruit slices with some paint.  For the fruit covered pie, I used red heart shaped beads as strawberries, slices of kiwi, lime, lemon and peach punched from the foam shapes along with seed beads used as blueberries.

I also used brown foam to make tiny macaroons and heart shaped cookies.  To create the rolled wafer cookies, I cut segments from an unfolded paperclip and painted them brown.  Everything is held together with super glue and hot glue.

For other decorations, I used cream colored fake flowers, a pink rose earring (the mate was eaten by the vacuum) and melted caramel colored Pearler beads.  The cherries are red seed beads with brown thread stems.    I seriously want to eat them, but I know that they will make some little doll family very happy.