Princesses

Last week, I had the pleasure of making two princess cakes for two of my favorite little princesses. Honestly, they belong to one of my favorite families.

Shhhh... Don't tell them. They might get big heads! :)

These sisters have birthdays very close to each other, so they had a joint family party. A princess party. With princess cake, of course!

Amber chose Belle.

Elena chose Rapunzel.

I had never made a doll cake before and it was a little trickier than I expected! Some people choose to bake the cake in a pyrex bowl to get the mounded shape of the doll's skirt. I chose not to because I like the predictability of baking in my round cake pans. I didn't want a situation where the edges of the cake were over-baked and the center not quite done, which can happen in the bowl because the center is so much deeper than the edges. So, I chose to bake two 8-inch rounds and two 6-inch rounds per skirt. Then I stacked and carved to get the skirt shape.

The bonus was lots of cake scraps for me, er, uh, I mean for my family. Yeah, that's right. My family.

These princesses had skirts that were 7 inches tall. That is tall for a cake! They had extra support to hold the weight. The general rule, for those of you who are wondering, is support every 4 inches of cake. If a cake is taller than 4 inches, it needs extra support in the middle.

It was so much fun doing the details of the dresses of these cakes! I tried to make them close to the originals and all the decorations are fondant. The swirls and flowers on Rapunzel's dress (down the front) were painted on using a little petal dust mixed with vodka. I mixed a couple of different purples with a little shimmer dust to get the color.

Oh, and I should mention what you probably already know. I am a little (okay, a lot) lacking in photography skills! The lighting on these pictures is terrible and the colors came out a little funky. That was actually a dark red paper behind Belle. I'm thinking a photography class or two would really help me! If any of you have any handy little tips to control lighting (without spending oodles of dough on a fancy lighting booth), I would really like to hear them!

Want the details of the cakes themselves? Of course you do! :)

Belle is vanilla bean cake with vanilla bean swiss meringue buttercream filling. Rapunzel is chocolate cake with caramel swiss meringue buttercream filling. Yum! Yum!

Thanks for stopping by and taking a peak at my cakes!