Purse Cake

I work with the teenage girls' group in my church. Every Fall, we hold an event called Young Women in Excellence which celebrates the girls' goals and accomplishments that year. This year, our chosen theme was, "The PURSEuit of Excellence". The whole program was purse-themed - we played purse games, decorated with purses on the tables, gave the girls hand-made purses for favors, and ate purse cake!

I've seen so many amazing purse cakes online and have been wanting to make one for a while, so I was pretty excited to make this!

I started with a four-layer rectangular chocolate cake, filled with buttercream, and then carved it to the shape I wanted. After frosting with more buttercream, I covered the cake in pink fondant and added the "leather" details with chocolate fondant and "metal" details with tan fondant brushed with edible gold dust.

I originally made two upright handles, but as they dried, they cracked and completely fell apart. So I had to salvage the broken pieces to make one handle lying down handle instead. If I were to do this cake again, I would make the purse handles from gum paste rather than fondant and given them a few days to dry and harden before placing them on the cake.