NO BOYS ALLOWED…only Daddy was the theme for this week’s cake. My 6 year old daughter and I created this awesome cake from start to finish. We had the best time working together for the last couple of weeks on all the details of the cake. I was able to teach her simple techniques as well as patience when it came to making a cake like this.
Here’s the inspiration for our cake: “The Berenstain Bears – NO GIRLS ALLOWED.” Now that we’re home all day with our kids because of COVID-19, we’re reading lots of books from our book stash. My daughter picked this book a couple of weeks ago and she decided that us girls should make our own clubhouse…a treehouse! Here’s our sketch of the cake that we wanted to make. My daughter had certain things she wanted for our “girls only” treehouse… a tire swing, a ladder (not in the sketch), flowers, and signs for the boys to know that they can’t come in!
All of the fondant wood siding for the treehouse was made by cutting out strips of brown fondant and using a modeling tool to make marks and creases in the fondant. This gives the fondant a wood grain look. These were cut a couple of weeks ago and left to dry.
Here’s more of the imprinting technique that we used with our modeling tools. We made lots of strokes or scratches on the green fondant to make grass. The tree was also imprinted to make the tree look like it had real bark. I scratched in my husband and I’s initials to make it even more personal.
We also dusted and airbrushed the piece to give it dimension. We waned to show shadowed areas throughout the tree.
We had to get creative for the leaves on the tree. We didn’t want to cut out tons of little leaves and glue them together so we decided to try rice crispy treats. I dyed the marshmallows green before I mixed in the rice crispy cereal to make the treats green. We attached the treats with more marshmallows as the glue. When the whole tree was dry I airbrushed the cereal with green airbrush color.
We also decided to decorate the treehouse with hearts and stars to make it nice and girly.
This is the internal structure for our tree that held the actual house (our cake). We used PVC pipes and some other stuff from Home Depot. It was nice and sturdy!
Here we are putting down the rice crispy treats on the internal structure to make the shape of the tree. It’s starting to come together.
This is how we put the bark texture on the tree. We used our tools to put lots of lines in the brown fondant on the tree.
Here’s my daughter making fondant decorations.
When it was time to put the whole cake together it took us about 2 1/2 hours to put all the decor on the iced cakes. We put buttercream on each slat for the outside of the house and attached it to the side of the cake. I love cakes like this because nothing has to be perfect or lined up, it’s a rustic look.
Here we are with our finished product. It was awesome working together for a hour every couple of days, building our inventory of decor for our beautiful cake. At the beginning my daughter thought we could throw together this cake in a matter of hours. She learned that this stuff takes time. Things needed to dry, be painted and molded in different stages for it all to come together for the finished product.
We hope you enjoyed our GIRLS ONLY treehouse…Oh, Daddy is welcome too! Thank you Lord for this special time with my daughter!!
Byrdie Girl Custom Cakes 