Make Character Cakes with Homemade Stencils

Make edible versions of your favourite characters on cakes with this easy, inexpensive technique

I'll use this little alien for this tutorial, from the movie Home

Print your character out whatever size you want for your cake. This is a tall 6-inch cake, so my character is about 5 inches tall

To replicate the character on the cake, you'll need stencils for each colour of the character

I'm starting with the blue vest, outlining it with a pencil onto parchment paper

You can use wax paper instead, anything non-stick that you can see through

On another piece of paper, or a different part of it, outline all of the parts of the next colour

purple for me, with the legs and the arms and the head

You only need to draw around the outer edge of each part. You don't need any of the details within it yet

I'm going to use the same purple for this circle on the vest too

and since it's the same colour, it can go on the same stencil. The mouth is going to be a different colour I just use a dark grey but you could use a separate stencil to make a tongue as well if you wanted to And then on this next stencil I doing all of the white parts the teeth and the eyes If you traced everything onto the same piece of paper cut them all out now so that you have a separate piece of paper for each of the colours If you layer your stencils over each other on top of the character you should have all of the details there now I still need a stencil for the blue parts of the eyes and the black pupils Cut all of the details out leaving the surrounding paper intact Your cake needs to be in the

fridge for at least an hour before the next step, so that the frosting is cold and firm

Wrap your first stencil around the cake, and this should be one of the background colours

that's going to have smaller details on top of it later. For simple stencils like this

with just one shape, you can press the stencil against the cake with your fingers

to hold it in place while you spread frosting over it. The frosting around the edges of the shape will hold the stencil in place

while you spread the frosting to cover the shape and then scrape sideways to take off the excess frosting to leave a thin, smooth layer behind

Peel the stencil off straight away and you'll have that shape on your cake

Put the cake in the fridge for about 15 minutes to set this shape

and then wrap your next stencil around the cake, lining it up over the part of the character that's already on the cake

already on the cake. The stencils like this, with several shapes on the same stencil

instead of pressing it against the cake with your fingers, it's better to pin the

corners of the stencil into the cake, because if you press the stencil against the cake

with your fingers for more than a few seconds, the warmth of your fingers will melt the

frosting on the cake and you'll leave a fingerprint behind on the surface of the frosting. The

stencil needs to be pulled tight so that it's pressed flat against the frosted cake

otherwise it will move around as you're spreading the frosting over it, and those movements will cause smudges of colour on your cake which you see on the circle on this alien vest when I peel off the stencil I should have pinned the bottom corners of the stencil as well as the top corners so that it wouldn move

Scrape the excess frosting off and if there are any indents or shallower areas

spread some more frosting over those and then scrape again until this frosting is smooth

When you peel the stencil off, you'll have more details of the character on your cake

The stencils look quite fun after using them and you could wipe off the buttercream and read

use them if you wanted to make this character again. One of the legs has smudged and that's easy to

touch up with a toothpick scraping off the smudged colour. The circle has smudged too and a toothpick is such a

great tool to tidy these parts up. This is how I cut out the stencils with a snip in the middle of

each shape and then stick one scissor blade in and cut around the outline, leaving the paper around the

shape intact. The thinner the layer of frosting you leave behind on the stencil, the neater it will

be because when you peel the stencil off, if the frosting is very thick, it will pull away with

the stencil and leave an uneven texture around the edges of each shape. This stencil for the white

details looks a bit creepy. For small shapes like this, it's useful to have a really small pair of

scissors, like sewing scissors, to cut the shapes out neatly. If curved shapes like circles are cut

with little jagged lines, that's the shape you'll have on your cake, so take your time to cut

the shapes out neatly For white shapes the frosting will need to be a bit thicker if it going to go on top of a dark color like this dark grey or dark purple Otherwise you be able to see the darker colours through the white frosting Two tiny circles here for the blue circles within the eyes

after chilling the cake for 15 minutes to set the whites of the eyes. You can pipe details onto the

cake too, which works well for the ribbing around this vest, which is textured, so the piping doesn't

need to be perfectly smooth. I don't recommend piping on details like the eyes, because those look better

when they lie flat against the cake, like the thin layer of frosting that I stenciled onto the cake

for the white and blue of the eyes on this alien, and now the black pupils

For very thin details like eyebrows or smiles, use a toothpick to scratch into the buttercream

and to add texture to buttercream, like on these purple lines, chill the cake first and then press the edge of a spatula

or a toothpick into the butter cream. Add your final details and you have a delicious edible character

that looks exactly like the original. Tell me in the comments which character cake you'd like me to do next

Here's a Calvin and Hobbs cake made by one of my cake school members and a sports team mascot that she made as well

both using this same layered stencil technique, which is part of my online program called Layer Up

where you work through three layers or levels of video modules to take your cake decorating skills from beginner to professional

Start your free seven-day trial by clicking the link up in the top of the screen

or in the video description or go to British Girlbakes.com. Thanks for watching