Louis Vuitton Handbag Cake Tutorial

A handbag cake can never go wrong with ladies. What more if it is designed after her favorite brand or model?

Here is one such cake I made for a friend who requested for one such cake. She did not just request for a handbag cake, she wanted a Louis Vuitton themed handbag and gave me a picture of the cake she wanted me to decorate.

A Louis Vuitton inspired handbag cake with a leopard print scarf and edible pearl necklace

Louis Vuitton Handbag Cake with Leopard Print Scarf and Pearl Necklace

So as usual, I tried to trace the cake back to the internet to locate its original designer. Unfortunately, after a good 2 hours, I had to give up as I was not able to trace the designer. The problem is, I decorated this cake a few years ago, and since I never published it, I did not keep the original image. So now, after a few years, I am totally not able to trace it. If you happen to know who the original designer is, please let me know here so that I can credit him or her for this lovely design.

Since my customer wanted an exact replica of the cake, I remade the cake in its entirety.

And I must say, when I was presented the image of the design, I fell in love with the awesome idea of a leopard print scarf and pearl necklace to go along the handbag!

How to Make a Louis Vuitton Handbag Cake

Main supplies for the cake:

Cake – This was a carved cake, and I carved it out of two layers of 7 inches square cakes. I used my butter pound cake recipe for the cake.
Buttercream – I used buttercream to fill the cake layers when stacking as well as to crumb coat the cake.
Fondant – The entire cake was covered in fondant and the pearl necklace was also made of fondant. I used Satin Ice in white and ivory for most parts and tinted white in brown and peach using Wilton food colors for other parts.
Gum paste – I used white Satin Ice gum paste and tinted it Ivory (with Wilton ivory food color ) to make the scarf on the cake.
LV edible print – I ordered the LV design prints from a local edible image supplies shop. Each sheet came is the size of an A4 paper. I ordered a total of 4 prints for this project.
Edible gold dust + lemon extract – I mixed these to make gold paint for all the gold metal parts of the handbag.
Wilton Ivory and Brown gel colors.
Cake decorating brush – I used a medium tipped brush to paint the leopard spots on the scarf.
Fondant stitch tool – I used this to imprint the stitch marks on the handbag.
Dental floss & needle – I used the floss as the thread for the pearl necklace. The needle was to literally insert the thread into each pearl to form a necklace.
Sugarcraft knife + pizza cutting wheel – These were the general cutting tools I used throughout this project.
Fondant glue

Assembling the cake:

I started by ordering my Louis Vuitton edible sheet prints from a local store.

Carving the bag cake

Closer to the event date, I starting working on the cake. I baked two 7 inches square cakes with each cake measuring approximately 2 inches high. I cut each layer into 2 resulting in 4 blocks of cake, each measuring 7 inches by 3.5 inches.
Next, I leveled these layers and sandwiched them together with buttercream. And then I carved the top portion of the cake to resemble the shape of a handbag. Carving this handbag cake was not too complicated. All I had to do was to get the top long edges of the cake rounded.

Adding the LV edible image

Once the carving was complete, I cleaned the cake of all large crumbs. I gave it a thin coat of buttercream and covered it in ivory fondant. After that, I covered the fondant in 3 pieces – 1 large piece that covered the main body of the handbag - base to base, and the other 2 pieces to cover the 2 smaller sides of the bag.
And then I attached the edible LV image sheets all over the cake in a similar manner as I did the fondant pieces, except that the for the main part of the bag (which was the largest part), I had to use two pieces of edible image sheets as these sheets came in the size of A4 papers and a single sheet was not enough to cover the entire portion.
After that, I did the seams for the bag. I used my extruder tool to pipe out the medium sized strips. And I carefully attached these to the edges of the handbag using my fondant glue. I had the seams at the base as well as on the sides of the bag.

Louis Vuitton Handbag Cake with Leopard Print Scarf and Pearl Necklace

The bag zipper

For the zipper, I manually cut out a rectangle piece of fondant. Using my pizza cutting wheel, marked the lines for my zipper. And then I attached it to the bag with glue.

The handbag cake handles

Next were the bag handles. I started with the gold square parts first. I cut them out with my sugar craft knife, smoothed the sides, and painted them gold. After that, I put them aside until the paint dried. While waiting, I cut out the hexagon pieces and shaped the handles. To assemble, I attached the hexagon pieces first and attached the gold parts.
In attaching these, I made sure the hexagon pieces were slightly longer on the top. This is so that I could fold that extra bit around the gold pieces. After that, I added the handles. I used a stitch tool to mark the stitching lines along the sides of the handles first. And similar to the hexagon pieces, folded the edges around the gold cutouts.

And while the fondant was still soft, I used my stitch tool to mark the stitch marks along the sides of the hexagon cut outs and the edges of the zipper.
With that the bag was complete.

The leopard print scarf

Next was the leopard print scarf. I tried making this in fondant. Unfortunately, it was not flexible enough to be rolled thin. So after a few attempts, I decided to switch to gum paste. I used white gum paste and tinted it ivory. And then I rolled it as thin as possible and painted the leopard prints on the scarf. These were pretty easy to paint and I have created a separated tutorial on how to paint the leopard prints and you can read all about it here.

After that I carefully placed it on the side of the cake. I made sure it was ruffled in the most natural way possible. To make sure the scarf remained in place, I applied glue to the scarf where it was in contact with the bag and the cake board.

Louis Vuitton Handbag Cake with Leopard Print Scarf and Pearl Necklace

The edible pearl necklace

After the scarf, I made the pearl necklace. I literally beaded the pearl necklace with pearl beads. The beads were super easy, just pinches of fondant of the same size rolled until round and smooth. For the thread, I used a string of dental floss attached to a clean sewing needle. And one by one, I inserted the pearls through the needle and dental floss. I did this until I had the necklace in the length I wanted.
To complete the necklace, I tied the ends of my dental floss together. I also adjusted the pearl beads so that one of the pearls cover the knot completely before placing the necklace on the cake. I positioned it on the cake first. Once I was happy with the position, I used glue to secure it in place.