Pretend Baking: Painting a 3D Cake

Disclosure:  This is part of a series reviewing art supplies, specifically those from Discount School Supply, our favorite art supply company.  Some of the products reviewed are our own; some of the products reviewed were provided free of charge from Discount School Supply.  I will note which were provided for review within the series.  Though I was offered some of these products for free, the opinions offered are my own and were not swayed by the free products.  This post also includes some affiliate links to Amazon for your convenience.

Other posts in this series include:

Golden Glitter Slime (and Dragons)

Painting the Bathroom Mirror

Baby/Toddler Colored Rice Art

10+ Ways to Use Fingerpaint

Make Your Own Puffy Paint Shirt
Starter Art Kit from Discount School Supply

S loves to bake.  In real life, in pretend play - it's a favorite activity around here.  So when I got these amazing red and blue puffy and light foam paints from Discount School Supply, my mind immediately thought of frosting.

To make the cake, I took a piece of white poster board (I think the thin cardboard that cereal boxes are made of would work equally well - I just happened to have a piece of poster board sitting right next to me so I went with that).  I cut a large circle and then a long rectangular strip and used 5 pieces of tape to attach the circle to the strip.  I grabbed six pipecleaners and a yellow foam sheet and cut out candle flames.  I then heated up my hot glue gun and glued where the seams on the cake were and glued each candle flame to each pipecleaner candle.  The last step before presenting the cake to S was to poke 6 holes in the top of the cake for the candles to slip through.

When I presented the blank canvas cake to S she was SO EXCITED.  "I feel like a real baker, Mama!" she exclaimed.  It was really cute to see how jazzed she was.

I shook the foam paint and squired a healthy amount out onto her tray.  Don't you just want to reach out and touch it?  Colorations Foam Paint is super dry, light, and fluffy.  It feels really amazing.  Because of the interesting texture, I really wanted to incorporate a form of painting that would allow S to really dig in.  We also did some full body floor painting with the foam paint that was equally fun (she really enjoyed squishing it between her toes).  If you do not have foam paint, you could easily use regular paint of course.  It's just fun to decorate a pretend cake no matter the materials involved!

At first she kept the "frosting" flavors separate.

But then she got really interested in mixing them together by squishing large handfuls back and forth between her two hands.

Ooh, check out the marbling on those foamy hands!

The foam paint is super light, airy, and fluffy when it's still wet.  It really looked so much like real frosting to us both!

Once the top of the cake was well frosted, S the baker moved on to the sides of the cake.

And what cake is complete without sprinkles?  We used some of our sequins from our art supplies as large sprinkles.

And S put the finishing touches on by using more of our Colorations Plastic Glitter (again, I have to note how awesome it is that the glitter doesn't dump.  I am not joking when I say this is the most child-friendly glitter dispenser I've seen yet!).

I threaded the candles through the pre-poked holes and voila!  We have a beauuutiful cake!  We sang Happy Birthday quite a few times.  :)

Once it dries, the foam paint gets a bit darker.  The foam peaks do dry in 3D, but they crumble into powder if you touch them.  Which, while fun, does not make it the most easily storable piece of artwork.  Like our scented edible fingerpaints and our shaving cream paints, we think of foam paints more as enjoyable in the moment, and not as something that creates artwork we are going to keep around long term (though I do think if you had a very thin layer of the paints it would keep better - it's mostly the foam peaks that are crumbly that I'd worry about).

Here's S with her dried cake pretending to blow out the candles.  :)

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.