Watch the full LED Cake Build Here:

What’s better than birthday candles? LED animations of course! In this video we’ll tackle the age old question: can you embed LEDs into a birthday cake? Using flexible LED matrixes and an arduino Natasha explores how to incorporate the matrixes into a cake and drapes fondant icing over them to diffuse the light. It’s an exciting use case for LEDs and a spectacular birthday cake!

Is it Cake? YES. Is it Blinky? YES.

One of my favorite things about Neopixel projects - or any Light project in general - is how the lights are being diffused. That can be the difference between a project that looks like magic and a project that literally hurts your eyes to look at.

I've seen so many ways to diffuse LEDS, from off-the-shelf LED channels to paper, fabric, plastic, glass, even glue sticks! But one thing I had never seen diffusing LEDs was cake fondant. I'm a huge fan of Cake Boss, and the whole time I was watching the series I wondered if they would ever put LEDs underneath the fondant. They didn't. So - I set out to find out if it was possible myself!

I originally planned to buy cake from a local bakery, but that plan fell through when I realized that the lead time to do so was several weeks ahead - but I decided to do this just about a week before my birthday!

So I had to make the cake myself. From scratch. Ok, from a mix but that was still a ton of work!

I realized that I could have bought foam cake blanks for the bottom two tiers, but I was certain that the foam would work - and I was interested in finding out if it was possible to add the LEDs to ACTUAL cake. Was this the simplest way? No! Did I care? No! I'm doing it all for the sense of exploration!