For the flowers along the tower and cake, I purchased some punch cutters and used that the same way as a cookie cutter, then I placed a tiny edible pearl in each one for the center of the flower. Tools for doing the fondant work: a fondant smoother, a rolling pin, paintbrushes, edible adhesive, toothpicks, and a knife. I originally started using the end of a paintbrush to gently press into the fondant and create a stonewall up the tower, but it didn’t come out as nicely as I had seen online so I ditched that pretty quickly. My husband had the tower covered and the roof tiles in place before I could doing some other party prep. With lots of straight pieces for the wood it really isn’t that difficult to free-hand. I used the inspiration cake and we really went from there. You do want it to be good before you add the fondant though since everything will show up when you apply the fondant. Remember, you don’t need it to be perfect, frosting layers before adding the fondant can be used to fill in the gaps. Frosted and covered it with the fondant and then the decorating begin. We measured the foam piece base and used the appropriate sized cutters to start with our tower and then eye-balled it using a knife and a Microplane to shaves down the edges. I purchased a foam piece from the craft store and used that for some of the tower to give it support and drove dowels into it anchor it into the sheet cake. I made a 9-inch cake and then used biscuit cutters to cut some circles out of it. We rolled out a large piece of green fondant and covered the cake. I used 3 sheet cakes and stacked them on top of each other, did my crumb-coat and then frosted.
It still takes a few hours to decorate so leave plenty of time! I wish we had kept track of how much time decorating took, but I’d say probably 4 hours in all? (This doesn’t include the preliminary cake and fondant making time.) Good music and good company makes it go by pretty fast ?įor this cake, the base cake was pretty easy to make. This way, once the kids go to bed we can frost and decorate the cake and not need to make everything as well. A week out, I make the marshmallow fondant and storing that in the refrigerator. I start off with baking the cakes a couple of weeks beforehand and then freezing them. What I do to make my life easier the night before is do as much prep beforehand. So, since we do have kids and a regular kitchen we have to do the decorating of the cake the night before the party. There are links below for recipes, the party, and inspiration.
You can see our how we’ve progressed from our first time with the Puppy Cake and the following year with her Hello Kitty cake. This is only the third time we’ve worked with fondant and I’ve gotten a lot of questions and compliments so I wanted to answer a few here and show you how we did this cake. My son George was almost 5 months and we had our hands full, but my husband thought we could pull off this Rapunzel cake and we did. He’s always helped, but he’s done it because he has to ? This year, I wanted to go for something simple. The first year or two they were my idea, but now my husband has gotten in on the action. Each year we go a little above and beyond the standard birthday cakes we grew up with and make something fun for my daughter Caroline.