Batman Birthday Cake and DIY No Sew Super Hero Capes

My son was turning 4 and that's the prime age for loving super heroes! He had asked for a Batman birthday party and that's what we did. I got a few batman decorations but mostly the cake and party favors were carrying the theme. The cake was his favorite (confetti) with mousseline buttercream in blue. I ordered some Fondarific black fondant as well as some white (from Amazon) knowing that in 6 weeks my little guy would be turning 2 so it would come in handy again (for a construction themed birthday cake). It was my first time trying Fondarific and I was pleasantly surprised, 1 million times better tasting and behaving than Wilton fondant. Cheaper too - give it a try. I rolled out some black fondant and free-form cut some buildings/city scapes that I layered to make the lower edge of the cake. I also used the black fondant for a larger oval and the bat shape using a batman cookie cutter (I bought this to make batman cookies for his preschool class since he doesn't even like cake, so no cupcakes for him!) 

I made some yellow fondant out of the white fondant and rolled out the "beam of light" and 4 and smaller yellow oval to finish off the batman logo, as well as the Happy Birthday letters. Finally I cut out tiny windows and used water to stick them on to the black buildings before placing the buildings on the cake. It worked out great. This batman cake was pretty easy to decorate! It was the nicest cake I'd made for my 4 yr old because his birthday is close to Christmas and it's just usually such a hectic time with schedules, work and cold/flu season, so I was happy this cake turned out so great. He didn't eat the cake (who knows why he doesn't like cake), but he loved the black fondant buildings calling it 'chocolate'. 

To go along with the theme, I was looking for non-junky party favor ideas which didn't include a bunch of cheap choking hazards from China. I came across do-it-yourself super hero capes here. I went to the fabric store to buy very soft fleece in black, royal blue and turquoise, as well as accent colors of red, yellow and white for the badges and lightning bolts and letters. (The original blog post I was following used felt for the badges but you could see the glue through it so I recommend using fleece.)

I think they turned out great! The only real problem I had was listening to the lady at the fabric cutting counter who told me to get Wonder Under instead of fabric glue. What a stupid mistake.. I followed the directions on the package and it was melting the fleece before it would adhere and ruined a bunch of badges and letters and probably my iron... really annoying when I had plenty to do besides redoing a bunch of this work! I was super ticked at that lady. Anyway, don't use Wonder Under and fleece!

The next thing I should have changed was skip the whole stick-on or glue-on velcro for the neck closures.. those ripped off all the capes after about the first 10 minutes of use. It would've been cheaper and easier to just snip a hole and tie a black ribbon on each side for the super hero to use as a tie for the cape. I ended up redoing that for my two kids' capes.. you could also try buying velcro which requires stitching, but that doesn't follow the "no sew" rules too well. So, I learned from my mistakes but these capes were pretty fun and an unusually cool party favor. Hard to top homemade personalized super hero capes!

I also used extra fleece and elastic bands for attempting to make super hero masks in coordinating colors, as I had forgotten I had already purchased some batman paper masks from the store. They looked cute but perhaps next time I'd use a template as they didn't seem to fit a variety of head sizes (we had ages 2 through 6 at the party) very well. The kids were excited for both masks and the cape in the party favor bags.