Kids Craft Ideas: Sponge Cake Craft

This Sponge Cake Craft is a fun kids’ birthday craft, but would also be great as an April Fools craft, a kids tea party craft, or as part of an unbirthday celebration! Really, it works for any occasion where you would expect to find cake.

Ella made this Sponge Cake Craft with me on my birthday and nearly convinced two of her uncles to try a piece!

This is an easy kids craft with lots of sensory input. While it has a definite design, it is still open-ended enough to allow children to have creativity with how they choose to decorate their “sponge cake slices.”

Materials Needed for Sponge Cake Craft:

New kitchen sponge (not natural sponge — that’s better for other crafts and explorations)
Homemade puffy paint using shaving cream, white glue, and food dye (or store-bought puffy paint)
Uncooked barley
Offset spatula for “icing” the cake
Pompoms (for cherries, etc)

I used the same recipe for the homemade puffy paint as we used for our Easter Egg bunting — roughly equal parts, you want the mixture to still be “puffy” but thick and not foamy.

And just like for our Neopolitan Ice Cream Play Dough Invitation, I dyed the barley with a bit of food colouring and water to make the grains look like sprinkles!

Cut the sponges into triangles (an older child can try to help) and let them decorate their cake slices!

This is a great activity for kids who love helping out in the kitchen, especially those who always want to help bake treats! This sponge cake craft is probably more fun that actually making a cake, since you can really play with your materials (and no one will have a sugar crash later).

We had so much fun decorating these, we made four slices out of a single sponge!

A package of 6 sponges cost me $1 at a dollarstore, making this an extremely frugal craft for kids. You can use the other sponges to make stamps, wet them down for a water fight or to practice transferring, or experiment with different painting techniques. (You could maybe even use a couple to teach the kids how to wipe up their own messes or clean up outdoor toys.)