Suitcase cake: vintage suitcase step-by-step tutorial with pictures

Would you like to make a fondant suitcase cake? Here’s a tutorial on how to make a funny vintage suitcase.

This theme is very used in birthday cakes for travelers because it offers a lot of possibilities and designs: a globe of the world with different country flags, stacked suitcases, passports, maps, plane tickets, thongs, sunglasses and everything that comes to mind. In this tutorial, I’ve decided to make a colonial style suitcase, typical from English colonies of the nineteenth century.

Preparation: everything that you need to make a fondant suitcase

In order to make a cake suitcase and a world map without an edible printer or without having to cut all continents and islands, you’ll need:

• A rectangular cake (20cm x 40cm x 8cm high) perfectly ganached. The ganache must be of a 3/1 proportion (3 parts of chocolate + 1 part of cream).
• Prepare and colour all the fondant. You’ll need 1,25kg of Renshaw Extra fondant coloured with ProGel Caramel and 200gr of Renshaw Extra fondant coloured with ProGel Brown + ProGel Chestnut, and CMC.
• Clean your working surface and prepare all the necessary tools: fondant rolling pin, pizza cutter, ruler and brushes.

Suitcase cake: step-by-step

1. Prepare a rectangular cake (20cm x 40cm x 8cm high). Remember to refrigerate the cake for at least two hours so that the ganache hardens. Put it on a cake base apt for cakes of 30cm x 50cm. If you can’t find a cake base that big, you can use a wood base and cover it with bakery cardboard.

2. Extend the caramel fondant with a fondant rolling pin. Remember that you can use some icing sugar to keep the fondant from sticking to your working surface. Slightly wet the cake with some water in order to glue the fondant. I recommend this post on how to cover square cakes.

3. Cut the corners with scissors. In this case you can do it this way, because we’ll cover the corners later with another piece of dark brown fondant.

4. Use two fondant smoothers to get sharp edges. This is an important step: the cake will look more realistic. Cut the excess fondant with an X-acto knife.

5. Colour 200gr of fondant with ProGel Brown and ProGel Chestnut in order to get a warmer brown. Add some CMC to harden it. This way, it will get thinner and more realistic.

6. Use a ruler to make a straight mark halfway up to divide the suitcase in two. Do it on all sides.

7. Cut strips of dark brown fondant (3.5cm wide). Texturize them with crumpled aluminium foil and mark the seams with a sewing tool (a small, rounded pasta cutter with spikes). You can use a ruler to help you mark the seams.

8. Glue the dark brown trims on all edges and corners. On the lower part, cut the strips in half width. Add two more strips and make the closing straps. Glue them at 4cm from the edge, like you can see in the picture below.

9. Cut some circles of 5cm diameter to trim all the upper corners. For the lower corners, cut the circles in half and glue one half on each corner.

10. Airbrush the cake with the special colorants Colour Flo by Rainbow Dust. Use a Brown + Yellow mixture to get a toasted, light brown tone. Intensify the shades on the extremes and on the central line.

11. Add more Brown Colour Flo by Rainbow Dust and airbrush all the dark brown strips.

12. Add three little circles of fondant on each corner and paint them with gold colorant.

13. Print a world map of 23cm length. Put a transparent acetate sheet on the map and mark the silhouette of the continents with a permanent marker.

14. Cut all the silhouettes with an X-acto knife. Try to make clean cuts.

15. Place the acetate sheet on the cake and airbrush only the edges. Use a low pressure and keep airbrushing at a short distance in order to mark the silhouette properly.

16. Use a brush to paint all the islands and archipelagos that we couldn’t cut. Use the same liquid paint from the airbrushing.

17. If you want to give your suitcase a final touch, varnish the whole suitcase to make it shiny.

Have you ever made a suitcase cake?

This is my proposal for this week. If you dedicate yourself to cake decorating, here’s a new recipe for your book. This suitcase cake is ideal for all times of year. You can, of course, let your imagination fly and invent different colour combinations, as well as different details. I hope you liked this tutorial. If you have any doubts, you can leave a comment below and I’ll answer as soon as possible.

Marc