Good morning 
I'm a newbie here. I'm no professional by far and I hope someone can help me out. I dabble in the craft and have only created cakes for my children's parties - oldest is now 22. ANYHOW, younges dd8 wants a cooking party. I'm a scrapper as well so invitations and decor looks amazing. This is going to be so much fun BUT, I have this old up up and away air balloonn cake pan from 1979 or so. It's versatile. I've made a lightbulb, ice cream cone, hot air balloon and now I think I'd like to make a chef's hat. It just seems way to simple. I'm looking for some cool ideas of how to decorate it. I could go traditional and just frost the ball area with a knife to create a puffy look, but was hoping someone might have some suggestions for this amateur? I've never used fondant, but thought I could go fondant on the bottom as the band area and then frost the rest? I know it won't be professional, but it's a mom cake made for a crew of 8 year old girls who'll be decorating cupcakes and rolling out pizza dough... If anyone has pics are any help or suggestions I'd be thrilled. Can anyone help? Thanks Liz
I think that the chef's hat would be a cute cake, but I don't know what you could do to it to "jazz" it up and still make it look like a chef's hat. I was thinking maybe something to tie in with the invites/decor? What do they look like? What do they have on them? Are their specific colors, maybe the hat could have polka dots, or stripes of different colors. But the majority of it would have to be white to come out like a chef's hat.
Wilton makes a Cupcake cake pan (think of it like a side view of an enormous cupcake) that I would think you could easily transition into a chef's hat. I saw them at Michael's the other day for under $6 (on sale or clearance, I can't remember). Here's a link to the Wilton description: http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?id=66C6B2DA-802D-F658-03388F04224D6436&fid=66C6B2F9-802D-F658-0E7220929B78DCF9. Might be worth looking into!
Ok I've got the pan in front of me now. I'd carve a little off the top in waves to make it look like those puffs. The top is too round for a chef's hat in my opinion. You'd have to fill in the raised bits and parts with buttercream and make the bottom a little fatter, cause it's just a tad too thin for the band part of the hat. You'd probably be faster just to bake a sheet cake and carve that, than to use the balloon pan. Then when you make cake spackle out of the bits and pieces you've carved (crumbed and mixed with a little bc) you can plaster it on to make the puffed part really stand out
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