Girly girly purse cakes

When I started this crazy hobby I never envisioned that I'd be making such girly cakes. But when the Relief Society called and said they needed a purse cake for their next meeting I was happy to get the practice.

My first problem was how to make the purse shape. I thought I'd have to stack a few small cakes on each other and basically cut the cake to shape. I hate wasting this much cake, though, so I got the idea to bake some cake in small, medium, and large loaf pans. When the cakes were baked I leveled them off, inverted them, and stacked them on each other to make an angled purse shape. I had to shave off some cake on a couple of sides, but I was really surprised how well it all fit together.

I wasn't sure how to get those zebra stripes on the cake so I just mixed a little black food coloring with some almond extract and painted the pattern on. The rest of the decor is just rolled fodant pierced with a fork to make the "stitched" pattern.

The base of the cake I decorated to resemble a hat box. I'm completely useless with ribbons, so thanks to Becky for helping me with the hatbox ribbon. Looking at the result, I must conclude that there may be a small bit of girly girl left in me after all these years.