For the first week of December we helped everyone get into the festive spirit with our cookie week of tutorials that included spiced snowflake sugar cookies, rustic winter trees and festive Christmas wreaths. Now it’s cake week and today we share how you can create a fun knitted winter hat at home complete with an adorable fluffy pom pom on top! Christmas is always a fabulous time for fun novelty treats so this vibrant cake is perfect for any lively get-together. You can even add cute cut out faces and extra color to make this design great for the kids’ table.
How to decorate a cosy woolly hat cake!
Materials and tools needed…
- 1 x half ball/hemisphere shaped cake on a decorated board or drum
- Red sugar paste/fondant
- White sugar paste/fondant
- Snowflake plunger cutters
- Edible glue
- Veining tool
- Cocktail stick
- Pizza or pastry cutter
- Paintbrush
- Cake smoother
Step 1:
Take some white fondant and add a peaked shape on top of your ball tool. Smooth down any bumps with a cake smoother.
Step 2:
Roll out red sugar past/fondant and cover your ball cake. Trim the excess fondant neatly.
Step 3:
Take some more red fondant and shape into a thick rope before using a rolling pin to flatten it out. It doesn’t matter if the strip rolls out a little uneven as it will just add a thick fabric look to your hat! If you keep the fondant rolled out to a slightly chunkier thickness when you add a knitted pattern it will look more ‘soft’.
Step 4:
To make the pom pom roll out a ball of white fondant and and texture with a cocktail stick with a scratching/jabbing motion. Attach to the top with a cocktail stick and some edible glue.
Step 5:
Add a knitted stitch look by making V-shaped notches with a veining tool around the hat. Keep in mind the direction of the knit!
Step 6:
Cut out some sugar paste/fondant snowflakes and attach using some edible glue and a paintbrush! Of course, you’re more than welcome to use cut out stars, trees, holly berries and leaves, bows, stripes etc.
This fun cake is perfect for a more novelty themed Christmas party or dinner plus you can customise it to suit any colour palette or theme. Why not cover a cake board with thick royal icing before nestling a finished hat on top to mimic a woolly hat lost in the snow! We love the idea of re-creating this cake in a deep forest green before adding ochre or light tan fondant star patterns and pom pom before painting with edible gold paint for a truly glistening cake.
This best part about this cake is that it’s relatively simple and fast. We decorated this design in 1 hour and 10 minutes, but obviously if you’re less experienced or you’re adding further decorative accents this may take up to a half day to finish; which still leaves enough time for a well-deserved rest so you can admire your work!
