Graffiti "8" Cake

My baby boy turns 8 this week (sniff). There's nothing that makes you realize how quickly time passes like having children and seeing their birthdays flashing by one by one by one, like a high-speed bullet train. I'm pretty sure a year lasted longer when I was a child than it does now. Had to! Time absolutely crawled back then. Now, it's like a time warp. Every time I turn around one of my children is a year older.

But fortunately, birthday cake helps cure the tiny bit of motherly wistfulness that comes with those birthdays. And with it, an excuse to drag out the cake toys and have some fun.


I was at a loss for how to decorate the boy's cake, considering the only thing he likes right now is GUNS. If he had to pick a vocation today, I'm quite certain I would have a SWAT team member for a child. But somehow, guns on a cake... eh, I wasn't feeling it.

Then I remembered an idea from one of my cake friends, Janet... a graffiti cake.

Fortunately, the boy approved.

I took a few "in progress" pictures and figured I'd share them (I love seeing progress pics, and hope y'all do too).

First, I carved the eight shape from a 9x13-inch cake, using a template I sketched out ahead of time. You can see the template here. I've used the bottom of the pan as a size guide.


For the bricks, I cut a stencil from paper using an X-Acto knife. I gave the whole cake a very light spray of black, to give it a kind of grungy urban feel. Working section by section, I first airbrushed a base layer of red bricks (I laid a piece of paper on the bare part to avoid overspray after I took this pic).


Then I took a clean dish cloth and gently pressed down on the "bricks" to give them some texture. Then I went back and airbrushed another layer of red.


(Sorry for the crap pictures, it was nighttime and I wasn't taking my usual 50 pictures just to get one good one.)

For the "COREY" graffiti, I found some example graffiti letters on-line and used them to make a template on a piece of parchment. I then took some white fondant and rolled it very thin. I laid that over the template, and then laid both over an "embossing light box" so I could clearly see the lettering.

Next, I used some edible color markers to lightly sketch around the letters. Then I used my cutting wheel to gently cut around the edges.


I used an X-Acto knife to cut the edges cleanly and pulled the excess fondant away.


Then I let it sit for a while to dry a bit. Next, I airbrushed the green, yellow, and blue. When the color was dry, I went back with my markers and darkened the lines and filled in the 3-d effect.

For the "WASSUP?" and the "HAPPY BIRTHDAY", I first searched for graffiti fonts on google and downloaded those to my computer. Then I printed them out in the size I wanted and used them as a guide for piping onto the cake free-hand.

Then a small tube, piped kinda sloppy around the edges, along with some spikey bits and voila! barbed wire.

OK, if you're still with me, thanks for following along. Hope you enjoyed it!

Night all!