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typography cake

The only thing better better than a birthday cake, is a birthday cake that can talk! Why not surprise the guest of honor at your next party with this creative typography birthday cake? It clearly expresses why you are celebrating, in a fun and festive way. These cakes are perfect for the slew of graduation and birthdays coming this month. HIP HIP HORRAY!

To make the birthday cake you will need; 1 box cake mix, any flavor (we used white), edible dough (any color), mini alphabet cookie cutters (these will vary in size, make sure they are small enough that when your word is spelled out, it will fit in your pan), a 9×5 loaf pan (or any cake pan in which your message can fit; a bundt pan is a fun one to use), rolling pin, and confectioners sugar.

Take your edible dough and knead it into a workable, pliable consistency. Then sprinkle a little confectioners sugar on a clean surface and roll out the dough to your desired thickness. Cut out the shapes of the letters you want to use in your message. For the cake in this tutorial, I used a whole package of edible dough and cut out the letters Y and A to spell YAY.

Make cake batter according to instructions on box. Grease your pan and pour enough batter in the pan to cover the bottom. Take your cut-out letters and place them in the batter, spelling out your word or message. Repeat this until you have crossed the length of the pan. Make sure the letters are lined up and straight.

Place the rest of the cake batter into a measuring cup (or piping bag if you want to really be careful) and pour batter slowly over the top of the letters, until they are covered and you have used up all the batter.

Bake cake in a 350F oven for about 40 minutes; check for doneness with a toothpick. Allow to cool before using a sharp knife to slice into the cake and reveal the surprise message.

This cake is a part of our creative cake series. Produced and photographed by Athena Plichta under the creative direction of Victoria Hudgins for A Subtle Revelry.

33 Comments

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  1. Sue, Hi… Athena repeated the word over and over down the length of the cake (see photo above) so no matter where you cut the cake it would say YAY! It worked perfectly:)

  2. I love this! But can you explain about the edible dough. The only thing I found was a German product called YummyDough that comes in different colors. Or do you mean fondant? That doesn’t seem quite right.

  3. OH.MY.goodness that is awesome!! never heard of edible dough before – just looked through the comments and saw that someone has already asked my question! oh, the words you can spell in CAKE! brilliant.

  4. instead of making it more difficult by individually cutting each letter, couldn’t you just make small skinny logs out of the edible dough and shape/cut the entire log into which ever letter you want? instead of having to individually cut them, try your best not to squish them while placing them, and placing them in the pan and pouring the batter in and making sure they dont fall over and stay aligned.

  5. LOVE this idea. I’ve seen it done many other places before and I as well have never heard of edible dough. The other places I’ve seen this concept they make the cake batter, however the recipe called for, and took a portion of it (depends on how much your making as to how much you need I suppose…), colored it, baked it up, let it cool and cut their letters out of this cake. Then they followed the rest of her tutorial of putting the white cake batter in, then the letters/shapes, then topping off with the rest of the white (or whatever color/kind/flavor you are using) and baked the cake off. Just a thought for those who said the edible did not work for them. I personally have not tried it yet, but would like to.

  6. You could bake a chocolate cake in a sheet pan, then cut the letters from it, freeze them and put them instead of edible dough, much like putting a shape in a cake. As long as the cake pieces are frozen, it will work.

  7. This is a wonderful idea!! I ‘d love to bake it but there are no stores that sell edible dough in my country.. Do you know any recipe of edible dough that i could make and use or had i used something else instead what should it be?

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