Hi all! I'm new here and have enjoyed looking thru so many posts...

I'm jumping right in. I have a cake I'm doing for this weekend for a child's birthday. The mom (my friend) wants her child's name carved out of cake with Disney figurines (Mickey, Minnie, etc.) "peeking out" from various areas in and around the name. I designed it to be basically a half-sheet on bottom, with the sculpted "name" cakes on top, and the Disney characters poking out here and there. She wants the name to be done in the style of the "Annie" musical letters.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do the name: Should I bake a bunch of 6" rounds and carve the letters? (almost all the letters are rounded in the their basic shape) Or should I use rice krispy treats and sculpt the letters, covering them in fondant? Any other suggestions?

Thanks all!

I like the idea but it seems like it would be really difficult to carve out cake letters and frost them without them falling apart-- unless the cake you are using is really dense. Even then, I would make them as "fat" as possible to avoid them tearing.


I would go for fondant/gumpaste letters as my first choice.... or rice krispie treats if you are really wanting thick letters. Good luck with whatever you decide!

I ditto the previous comment. Cover rice krispy treat letters w/ fondant and place them on the cake. Cutting letters out of cake makes it too weak to work with.

What I would do is have templates of the letters ready and then place them on the back of my cake pans (if you plan on using cake instead of RKT) to see which pan would work best so you have the least amount of waste and I'd make sure the cake was at least partially frozen when carving out the letters. I think the idea itself is really cute but depending on the size of the letters could make for a huge cake.

RKT's would work really well too.

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't worked with gum paste or modeling chocolate yet, so I'm a little leery of going that route.

My DH mentioned getting a small bundt cake pan for some of the letters...

Also, what about using something like angel-food cake, which is sort of foam-like? Like, if it were frozen, do you think it would carve well?

For carving the denser the cake the better. Pound cake is always good or you could try WASC which should do well for a cake like this.

Here are some recipes for WASC:

http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=Search&s=wasc

you can find more in the recipes section.