Doll Sponge Cake (literally)

For the first little while this year, we'll be doing American Girl-related crafts for our art classes. (We homeschool, in case you didn't know or don't remember.) Our first project was a sponge cake - literally!

My son made the yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

My daughter made the strawberry cake with vanilla icing.

My husband thinks they look like Little Debbie snack cakes, and they really do.

The kids made the whole cakes and I made the slices so I could work along with them, demonstrating steps without doing their projects for them. We had a great time with this, and the kids are really impressed with how realistic everything looks.

I bought two packs of sponges from Dollar Tree (yellow and pink). They came with three sponges in each pack. We traced a Nutella-sized lid to get our cake shape, so we were only able to get one full layer out of each piece of sponge. That meant that I had one sponge left to make individual pieces with. I simply cut the same size circle out of the third layer, cut that layer right through the middle, and I had just enough for a cake half once I stacked them.

We put thick white craft foam in the middle of the layers and hot-glued it all together. (I used the hot glue gun so the kids wouldn't get burnt.)

At this point, I cut each of my halves into three pieces each. The idea was to have a whole cake to put on a cake stand and pieces of cake to put on the doll's plates.

We used Scribbles fabric paint for the icing on the outside. It has a nice, pointed tip, but we also used brushes to spread the thickness out a bit. It's a very realistic effect when it's dry!

For the individual pieces, I only iced the outside parts that would be iced if you cut it from a whole cake.

We're going to make good use of these at my daughter's birthday party in a few months. We're doing an American Girl party, and the dolls are going to have their own table and food (fake, of course).

I also picked up some yellow, red and blue fabric paints at Dollar Tree. I considered "decorating" the cakes, but I think my kids would get too frustrated with that. They've inherited some perfectionist tendencies from both my husband and myself. :)

I may end up making and decorating one special "Happy Birthday" cake to use on birthdays, if I get the chance.