Today I’ll be chatting about a cake I made for a friend’s mother this past weekend. I was told to incorporate lots of pink and make the overall theme “Princess.” Since this was for an adult, I decided a more classic royal style would be best.
I love the baroque aesthetic, guys. By “love” I mean “am utterly obsessed with.” I’m basically never going to pass up an opportunity to make a cake in this style, and this time it fit perfectly. I was pleased as punch.
The birthday gal loves simple white cake, so I chose to make 3 small tiers of white cake with an Italian Meringue buttercream. It had to serve less than 30 people, so I went with a 8″, 6″ and 4″ size. First I carved my cakes into their respective shapes: hexagonal, a curved bowl shape and an hourglass cake. The top and bottom tiers I iced in pink buttercream, while the middle tier was left with a white crumb coat. This is because I was going to be covering it with fondant ruffles. I placed in cake supports and stacked them, choosing to decorate the cake already assembled.
The top buttercream layer went through several smoothing stages. In the above photo I was waiting for another spell in the fridge to firm things up before I smoothed the hourglass. I also started applying the puffed quilted squares, which I made by folding together the edges of very thinly rolled fondant rectangles.
Next up I began applying fondant ribbons, and also added an oval heart shaped plaque to each side of the hexagon. I actually used a cookie stamp for this design. The cookie stamp was round originally, but I gently pressed each plaque into an oval before applying it to the cake.
I also made some fondant roses using simple rounds wrapped around fondant cones.
Next up I made the crown. I wish I’d taken better photos of the process, but essentially I made a chocolate crown and piped on it with royal icing. Here it is drying; once both it and the roses had set up I airbrushed them in gold.
At this point it was all details. I added small fondant balls between the quilted rectangles, piped buttercream details on the whole cake and painted parts of the plaque in gold for contrast. This took forever, but at around 11PM I was done and snapped this photo in my kitchen.
The delivery went well and I managed to get some photos of the cake cut, with its poor little dowels exposed and everything.
Finally, here are some final photos and detail shots:
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you all next week with a lovely Valentine’s Day dessert!
