The Shoe Cake

A friend at work asked me to do a birthday cake for one of the guys that she works with. He’s notorious for complaining about his feet, so she asked me to do a shoe, specifically a red Converse high top. Not done one before, so was a bit nervous. Started off with the lemon cake that I use for fondant fancy and baked a square cake, then using a paper template, carved the basic shape.

I used one of my high tops to use as a basis of the actual carving of the general shape.

It was then a case of the decorating, only slightly daunting!! I used the Renshaw sugar-paste, because I wanted a proper red. I’d made rough paper templates from one of my shoes, and then used those to cut the general shapes that I needed. Because I was only working with small pieces of sugar-paste, it was actually a lot easier than I thought it’d be. I started by putting the tongue on and made sure that there was some overhang at the top. I then went on to put each of the sides on. Because the templates were rough, I had to do a little trimming. Then came the white toe piece, which took a little while to get the shape correct. Then the strip at the back that covers the area where the two side pieces meet.

I then had to tackle the rubber area at the bottom. I used a Wilton strip cutter to do most of it, and that worked great, but the extruder that I bought to do the black strips, that was a problem as my hands weren’t strong enough to get the sugar-paste through, so I just cut those by hand with a craft knife. I did some of the detail with a sugar-paste tool.

The laces were cut with the Wilton strip cutter. I couldn’t find a texture sheet that was cheap enough for the lace fabric, so I made the markings by hand with a sugar-paste tool. I cut out the eyelets using plain circle piping nozzle and put them onto the shoe and painted them with edible silver paint. I then cut the laces into strips and copied the lace pattern on my shoe. This section was far easier than I thought it’d be and looked really quite effective!! The part that I was most worried about doing was next, the piping of the logo! I cut the circle out, and then using a paper print out, I marked what I needed to pipe. I used some Tesco writing icing as a cheap and it was a weekday so I didn’t have that much time. The colours weren’t right, but done was better than good at this stage! As the shoes tend to turn up a bit at the front, I used some black sugar-paste (again Renshaw) to add a small section at the front to give the illusion that the toe was turned up.

I was really very happy with the way it turned out, and everyone at work was really delighted. The cake was ‘unveiled’ at about 9:30, but they refused to cut into it until about 1 because no one wanted to be responsible for cutting into it. Had a few random people come up to me asking if it was me that made the cake and said how amazing it was.