Faith Is Like a Cake
This is a fun activity and teaching device for primary girls or young women.
I like how it combines cake decorating (which lots of girls are interested in trying) with a meaningful application.
I hope you and your girls love it too! See below for tips.
Activity
We did an activity where we decorated “Faith Cakes” and talked about how baking a cake is like growing faith. We did the activity online, believe it or not, due to COVID-19!
Why a “Recipe” Helps
Just like you follow a recipe to make a cake, growing faith can follow a predictable recipe. If you forget an ingredient, it may not work as well as you wanted. If you pay attention to the recipe, you’ll get better results.
Give It Your Best – “Quality Ingredients”
If you put the right ingredients in, you get faith. If you put scripture study into your “cake,” especially if it’s high quality scripture study, you get better results than if you skip reading your scriptures or if you only read one word a day. One word a day is better than zero, but a whole page a day would get you more “faith taste.”
Don’t Fake It
In addition to the explanation above, we’ll discuss how, once you’ve made your cake, you can decorate it and make it all pretty, but if the ingredients in your cake were rocks and mud, it still won’t taste good.
That’s like how we can pretend to be “good” or “righteous” but if we didn’t add the faith ingredients, pretending won’t make our faith better. It’s important to put the best ingredients into our life. Likewise, if we put the correct ingredients in, but just pretend we baked the cake, we won’t get good results. We’ll be half-baked. 🙂
TLDR (Short Summary)
To sum it up:
- Put the right ingredients into your life (scriptures, prayer, temple)
- Make sure it’s high quality ingredients (sincere prayer, thoughtful scripture study)
- Don’t fake it: do the work. Don’t be half-baked!
How We Did the Activity
Since we were in the middle of the coronavirus quarantine, each girl made her own cake and frosting. We gave them a list of what to have ready. We also gave them a frosting recipe so that everyone would be using the same type of frosting. We had them make the cake a day early and put it in the freezer.
- The day of meeting, we started with a discussion of how baking a cake is like growing faith. (We had told them ahead of time to think about it.)
- Next, we crumbcoated the cake and put it in the fridge. You can Google crumbcoating for great info on how and why to do it. Basically, you spread a thin frosting coat and chill it so when you do the normal frosting, you don’t get ugly crumbs messing up your smooth finish.
- Next, you can show them how to put frosting in their bag (some hadn’t pre-loaded theirs, plus they’ll have to refill as you work).
- Show them how to put a tip on. Then, show how to do a dot and then have them try some dots on a practice surface.
- After they are comfortable with that, you can put on a star tip and show them how to do stars. Then let them practice, still just on paper or a plate.
- Lastly, you could show them rosettes and again let them practice.
- After that, we let them decide what shapes to use and how to decorate their cakes. They got their cakes and just decorated while we watched. Some tried grass tips and loved them, etc.
They had great fun!
I wasn’t sure how this would go down doing it online, but it turned out great! If you are super motivated, you could supply the cakes and frosting to everyone. I wasn’t sure I could commit to that, time-wise, so the moms helped the girls prep everything. They were also close at hand in case their daughters needed help, since I couldn’t be there in person.
I’ll attach a copy of one of the reminders about the activity and what to have on hand. You’re welcome to make copies and use it.
ChurchofJesusChristYoungWomen.com