Gift Wrapping a Cake Board

Gift Wrapping a Cake Drum

This weekend I'll be delivering my cousin's daughter's 1st birthday cake.  I wanted to decorate the cake drum with something special.  After the tidal wave of babies in my family last year, I had some baby-themed gift wrap paper left over.  Hopefully I can get the cake colors to match this!

Stats:

• 14" round cake drum
• gift wrap paper
• clear contact paper
• paper cement

 

Using the drum as a guide, I roughly cut out a circle (probably 18" in diameter) out from the wrapping paper.  I smeared paper cement to one side of the cake drum.  Paper cement is just like rubber cement but a little thinner.  The gift wrap was firmly adhered to the surface.

  

Putting aside the drum, I made another rough cut circle out of clear contact paper.  This is my first time using contact paper, and it went well.  I do realize that this is not necessarily food safe (I know some brands are).  My cake will have a cake board in between it and the drum, so I'm not worried about it.  It was tricky to peel off all the paper.

  

The gift wrap and drum were flipped on to the sticky side of the contact paper.

  

At regular intervals, I made cuts into the over-hanging contact paper with some scissors.  The slits were folded over to the other side of the drum and smoothed out.

  

I need to find something to hide the 1 mm (~1/2") ugliness on the side now.  At some point I'll go to a craft store and try to find some matching ribbon.  I guess I can glue the ribbon down on to the side.  Ya ... I'll update this when it's finished.

 

UPDATE (02/18/2010):
I researched covering a cake drum with wrapping and contact paper on cakecentral.com.  Here is an interesting post about the food safety-ness of contact paper:

http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopict-659738.html

To summarize, clear contact paper contains no lead, but the chemicals used to make it flexible can leach out to greasy or acidic food.  They do not recommend exposing food directly to the surface, but you're not gonna die if it happens.  So I've got the right idea of planning on putting a food safe barrier between that and the cake.

Another post explained that you can stick the wrapping paper to the contact paper first, then adhere them on to the board.  It's easier to get all the bubbles out that way.  I did have some bubbles in mine, but I eventually forced them down.  Their way seems easier ... next time I'll do that.