How Mara Tirado Makes a Purse!!

To make it easier, start with a book pan. I got my smallest one from Fiesta Cakes. Using a book pan keeps you from haing to trim cake. I hate doing that, too much waste. If you don't have a book pan you can use a round, square, anything you have to make your purse cakes.

As you can see they have a "natural" purse-y shape...just close your eyes and add the handle or strap...lol

Here is my baked cake. turned out from the pan. Frozen for about an hour to make any cutting and or trimming easier.

I cut my cake in 1/2

Here is the cut, straight down the middle.

Stand one 1/2 on your board.

Put your buttercream filling on the other 1/2 and sandwich them together tightly, I use a round tip to go around the join to make sure my buttercream is filling all the nooks and crannies. Then ice the cake with your favorite buttercream.

Sugar Craft Gun...A Cake Decorators BBF! I used the the disc shown to make my "cord". You extrude it and hold one end while you roll the other end up or down...pick a direction and stick to it. It will look like a braided cord.

Cord, Flap and zipper attached. I'm sure that you guys know how to ice and cover a cake with fondant? or you can just do a butter cream cake and pipe on the details.

Here is what the cake looks like. Nothing fancy, but feel free to let loose when you do yours. You can quilt it, paint it, add fondant circles, stripes or shapes, whatever your little heart desires. Or your customers desire. lol

Use 18g wire. and 2 coffee straws that you will cut in 1/2 to get 4 pieces. ( my wire here is bent. Use new wire that's not bent.

make 4 small balls of fondant.

place the 4 small balls of fondant where you think you would like the handle of your purse to be.

Push the cut coffee straws into the balls and into the cake, leaving a little bit of the coffee straw exposed.

Make a fondant sausage. Not to much or you will have a great big chunky handle.

Thread the wire into the sausage that you made. Slip the fondant sausage toward the middle of the wire.

Roll the threaded fondant sausage out to make the handle the lenght you like. Keeping your sausage as even as possible.

Ok, this was supposed to be a video. While holding both ends in your hands, you first bend one side gently, then the other...making a sort of rocking motion...down and up. You keep doing this until you have the "U" shape of a handle. You leave some of the 18g wire exposed on eighter end so you can place it into the coffee straws that are embeded in the fondant balls on the purse. As you can see the ends of my sausage come to a bit of a point.

Push the handle into the coffee straws, pushing the exposed coffee straws into the cake, through the balls that you have placed on the cake. I like to taper the ends of my sausage a bit to make a more "refined" handle. Make the second handle if you like, or you can just use one. This is the way you can make a purse cake, quickly and not have to worry about letting the handles dry for 3 days or more!

Photos, patterns and tutorial by Mara Tirado, 2009 all rights reserved.

This tutorial was used with the expressed permission of Mara Tirado of Heaven Lee Cakes and may not be reproduced without written permission from the author.