Renee's Birthday Cakes

When I finished my last cake decorating class, my mom asked me if I'd do the cake for my sister Renee's birthday, a few weeks away.  I was excited to try something new, and started looking around the Wilton website for ideas. What I found was this.  It was perfect.  Renee is a seamstress, and makes lovely wedding dresses.  I decided to just do the big cake, as that would be enough for the usual birthday crowd.

I rented the cake pan from PM Hobbycraft. When I got it home I thought I'd better make 2 cakes, just in case one wasn't enough.  The pan wasn't nearly as big as I thought it would be.  So I came up with a colour and flavour scheme for the second cake (yellow & blue/ lemon & blueberry).

After a couple of mishaps with baking the cakes (I really need to get a louder timer), I had two lovely cakes in my freezer, waiting for the day of the party.


I had to figure out how to make the bodices.  The pattern on the website uses fondant, but I've never worked with it at all before, and I didn't want to practice on a 'real' project.  I'm also too cheap to buy a whole box of fondant for such a small required amount.  I was not going to cover the whole dress in fondant - it doesn't taste nearly as good as 100% butter buttercream.  So, I made them with royal icing.  I used 4 copies of the pattern provided on the website, covered them with waxed paper on a piece of cardboard, and piped and filled in the pattern with the icing, 2 pink and 2 white, as well as piping the hangers.  I waited a few days, then used more royal icing to glue each pair of bodice pieces together, sandwiching the hanger in between.  It worked a whole lot better than I expected it to.

I also had to make all the flowers.  I used a few different drop flower tips (I honestly can't remember which ones), and piped them all on a cookie sheet lined again with waxed paper.  I had decided to use gold peal dust to make the flowers shimmer.  There are two application methods listed on the pearl dust package - I chose the wrong one.  I chose to try the wet method, mixing the dust with clear vanilla and brushing it on with a soft brush.  The shimmer was all blotchy.  Bad enough that I scrapped them all and with only 36 hours 'til party time, re-piped all my flowers and applied the gold dust the with a dry brush.  That was definitely the right choice.  They looked much better.  Unfortunately, the flowers lost some of their definition as I dabbed on the dust, so I don't think I'll use the it on buttercream flowers again - at least not the little flowers.

Once all was prepped, I just had to put it all together.  I cut a slit in the top of each cake, after icing it, and tucked in the bodices.  I then glued all the flowers on with more buttercream icing.  I used  (or broke!) every one of the pink flowers, but only about half of the yellow.

This is actually a simplified account of this project.  I ran into snag after snag, but it was a great learning experience.  I'm glad I have no current cake projects in the works and I can just relax and get ready to go on vacation.