Tools Birthday Cake – A Decorating Tutorial

I made this tools birthday cake for my dad’s birthday. This was made a few years back (and I cannot recall which year, and so don’t recall which birthday it was for him!) and the idea of making a tools cake came from one of these favorite activities which is carpentry.

Tools Birthday Cake Decorating Idea

My dad loves carpentry for he was always up to making something at home, and in fact, he literally made most of the furniture we had at home on his own. His had his own workspace at the back of the house and he owned all sorts of carpentry tools! So on his birthday, I decided that a tools birthday cake would be suitable for him!!

Tools birthday cake for men

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How to Make Tools Birthday cake:

Tools to make the birthday cake:

• One 8 inch square cake – I baked this cake using my butter pound cake recipe. The cake itself was a single layer one.
• Buttercream & butter icing – I used buttercream to crumb coat the cake and used butter icing to cover the whole cake. I did not tint the icing, hence the natural ivory hue to it. In case you are wondering what the difference between buttercream and butter icing is, the only difference is in the consistency of the icing. Butter icing is much more to stiffer than buttercream and I prefer to work with it to cover cakes. 
• Fondant – I used fondant to create all the tool toppers on the cake. Each and every tool on the cake were handmade and edible and I made them using my homemade fondant.
• Wilton Alphabet cutter – I used these cutters for the birthday message. The messages read “Happy Birthday Tataiyya”. “Tataiyya” simply means granddad and I used it instead of Dad because the cake was like more from my kids to their grandfather rather than from me to my father!
• Wilton Food coloring in yellow, red, brown, and moss green.
• Edible silver dust – I mixed this with some lemon extract to be painted on the ‘steel’ parts of the tools.

Assembling the cake:

Making the tools

• I started off by making the carpentry tools a few days in advance. All the tools were made of fondant. I chose to make them all in white fondant and paint them later once they were set.
• There are closer images of all the tools on the cake, but if you can see them on the cake, I made ladders, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, nuts and bolts and spanners. I hand molded these and then painted them.

Baking and frosting the birthday cake

• Once the tools were ready, assembling the birthday cake was quite straight forward.

• I baked the cake in a square cake pan, like a sheet cake. I did not layer it any further and used it as a single layer cake. As soon as it was baked and has cooled down, I leveled the top and covered it with a thin layer of crumb coat.

• After that, I covered the entire birthday cake with butter icing. Butter icing is the stiffer version of buttercream and is alot easier to manage in hot and humid weather.

• I used a spatula to smooth the butter icing on the top and sides of the cake.

Fondant alphabets for the cake

• Next, I cut out the wordings for the cake using alphabet cutters in pink fondant. I arranged them on the cake in such a way that they are centered on the cake. Since the cake was covered in butter icing, attaching the fondant alphabets to the cake was easy. There was no need for any fondant glue or a brush of shortening to secure the alphabet letters on the cake.

• Once the letters were all in place, I added the fondant tools. Before placing them on the cake, I roughly planned their position so that each tool is well spaced out on the cake.

Attaching the fondant cake decorations

Again, attaching the fondant tools to the birthday cake was easy. There was no need for any special glue to hold them in place. I simply pressed them gently into the butter icing on the cake and that helped to secure them to the cake.

Tools birthday cake with handmade fondant carpentry tools

And that was pretty much how I made the tools birthday cake.

My father had a big smile on his face when my children and I presented the birthday cake to him.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial 🙂