A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Bakes...

Disney Classic # 12 - Cinderella

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later... I had my first disaster cake!! It all just went so wrong!

My mum asked if I was drunk when I made this... It does look a little tipsy, doesn't it?

When I thought about doing a cake for Cinderella I knew it had to be the castle. The castle is probably one of Disney's most iconic images... and every princess wants her own castle cake... right? I knew it would be difficult, especially as firstly I didn't want to do just any old castle cake, it had to be fairly recognisable as Cinderella's Castle. 

That is an awful lot of towers and turrets...

Secondly - I'd never made a castle cake before, so I wasn't sure what would work or what wouldn't!! I referred to a couple of cake decorating books for ideas of how to create this "masterpiece". Debbie Brown's 50 Easy Party Cakes (Castle Guards, pg 70 and Dream Castle, pg 85) and The Australian Women's Weekly Kids' Birthday Cakes (Palace of Dreams, pg 80). What I noticed was that generally people didn't bake castle cakes, but rather they assembled them. So, I felt a bit like I was cheating when I went out and bought some swiss rolls... The part of the cake that was baked by me used my standard vanilla sponge recipe.

What went wrong? Well, I think there are two reasons for the wonkiness of my towers. The first (and what I think is the main cause) was that I made a bit of a schoolboy error when measuring the cakes. I measured, cut and assembled the cake before I iced it, to make sure the shapes and sizes were right. And before any of the icing went on, things were looking promising:

Look at those towers all standing nice and mostly straight

However, when I made the measurements I didn't account for the additional length added by the icing. Now this may only be a few millimetres per swiss roll, but when you add them together the cakes that were resting on top of the base didn't actually fit on the base. Humph. So they leaned into the towers next to them, causing those towers to also lean. To be honest, I'm lucky it didn't all collapse! Another thing that could have contributed was the tops of the towers being too heavy as I covered them in fondant icing - in hindsight it would have been better to use a lighter icing, like butter cream or royal icing, or maybe to dip them in chocolate.

You can probably gather that I wasn't best pleased with how this cake turned out, but you live and learn! Next time I make a castle cake I won't be making the same mistakes again. And regardless of how it looked, it was a pretty tasty cake, and there was so much of it that all of my friends got to take a massive chunk home with them too!

For those of you who would like to have a go at making your own version of the disaster castle, I've put the ingredients and method below. ^_^

Prep time: 1-2 hours Cook time: 20 mins Serves: 20+

Ingredients:

200g margarine
200g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
2 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
2-3tbsp strawberry, raspberry or mixed fruit jam
2 jumbo swiss rolls
3 standard swiss rolls
2 mini swiss rolls
10 ice cream cornets
1.5kg white ready to roll fondant icing (plus a further 180g for making the Cinderella model - see yesterday's post!)
Blue food colouring
Purple food colouring
Edible glitter (I used White Hologram)
75g unsalted butter
125g icing sugar

1. This cake takes quite a bit of time to put together, so I found it easier to colour my icing and make the Cinderella model the night before baking/assembling the cake. Full details of how to make Cinders are found here. I coloured 150g of white icing lilac, and 250g of white icing blue, for the tops of the towers.
2. Preheat the oven to gas mark 5 and grease and line a square baking pan.
3. Cream the margarine and caster sugar together in a bowl. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl. Sift in roughly half of the flour and fold into the margarine mixture. Add roughly half of the egg to the bowl and beat well. Keep alternating flour and egg until the mixture is completely combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake pan and bake for approx 25 mins, or until golden brown and firm to touch. Remove the cake from the oven and set to one side to cool.
4. Whilst the cake is cooling, make butter cream by combining the unsalted butter and icing sugar in a large bowl until smooth.
5. Once the cake is cool, cut it into quarters. Use the strawberry jam to sandwich the four squares of cake on top of each other to make the base of the castle.
6. Stand the swiss rolls next to/on the base and cut to the appropriate sizes. (See picture above for reference.) You can always stick pieces of swiss roll together with a bit of jam if you need to make a bigger tower. I used 2/3's of a jumbo swiss rolls for two of the side towers, and two regular swiss roll for the smaller side towers that stand in front of those. I used 1/3 of a jumbo swiss roll for the large tower that rests on top of the base at the back, and cut the third regular swiss roll in half to create the two smaller towers either side of that. for the three small towers at the front of the base, I cut mini swiss rolls in half.
7. Using a serrated knife, carefully cut the ice cream cornets down to the required size(s). Check that all of the towers fit together. Cover each of the cornets in butter cream. Roll the blue and lilac fondant icing into small balls and flatten these between your thumb and forefinger. Stick these "bricks" into the butter cream until the tower tops are completely covered.
8. On a powdered surface, roll out some of the white ready to roll fondant icing. Cover the base and each of the swiss rolls in fondant icing, using a little butter cream on each to help the fondant to stick.
9. Reassemble the various towers, sticking to the base with a little butter cream. Stick the cornet tower tops onto the swiss roll towers with a little butter cream. Paint a front gate onto the cake using a little food colouring and place the Cinderella model in front of the castle. Give the whole thing a generous sprinkling of edible glitter.
10. Cut into slices and enjoy!

Hopefully next time we'll have a bit more luck with Alice in Wonderland, when I'll be making "Eat Me" cupcakes and "Drink Me" potions!


Happy Thoughts
x

Cinderelly, Cinderelly, CINDERELLLLA!

Disney Classic # 12 - Cinderella

So normally I wouldn't make two posts for one cake - but (!!!) this week's cake is particularly complex to describe. Originally I wasn't going to post the details about how I made the mini Cinderella who stands with the castle, but then I figured there may be someone somewhere who might like to know. I also don't normally post step by step photos, but I figured this time it may help. So, without further delay, here she is!

I've been making little figures out of fondant icing for a while now to sit or stand on or next to a novelty cake. I've never made an animated character before though! (This post is just full of firsts!) Usually they are characatures of the friend(s) that the cake is for, and a couple of times I've done characters from books. Doing these figures I developed a bit of a style - making them simplified and dumpy looking with no facial features - but I kind of like it so I'm sticking with it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know this figure does not specifically look like Disney's Cinderella, but that's OK, because she is my version of her.

The real deal

Prep time: 30 mins

Ingredients:

180g ready to roll white icing
Food colouring (I use paste colourings, as you use less than liquid, the colour is more vibrant, and the icing doesn't get as sticky and so is easier to work with.)
Sugarflair Paste Colouring in Baby Blue
Sugarflair Paste Colouring in Yellow/Cream
Sugarflair Paste Colouring in Pink
1 tbsp icing sugar
few drops warm water

1. Make sure your hands are very clean and dry, otherwise the icing can get dirty/sticky/a bit gross.
2. Start off by making a very rough model out of white icing. Don't worry about making it stand at this stage, this is purely to give you an indication as to how much icing you will need in each colour. If in doubt - over-estimate! As an indicator, I used the following:
• 115g icing coloured baby blue for the dress
• 25g icing coloured a lighter shade of blue for the aaccents and the headband
• 10g icing coloured yellow for the hair
• 30g icing coloured flesh for the head and arms. (Note: you can buy "flesh" coloured food colouring, but I don't have that one so I used a little pink and a little yellow - it seems to work fine!)
3. Use a toothpick to place a small amount of colouring paste onto the icing you are colouring, and knead this until the colour is even. The best thing to do is start with a tiny bit of colouring and then add to it until you have the desired colour, it's always easy to make the icing darker, but not as easy to make it lighter.
4. Mould the various shapes/components which will make your figure. If you have tools and know how to use them then great, but I just mould these with my hands - it's a bit like playing with playdough. It is important at this stage to make sure that the base of the skirt is flat and even so that the figure will stand unsupported.
5. Put a tbsp of icing sugar into a small bowl and add a couple of drops of water to it to make a sticky icing that you will use to "glue" the pieces together. Take care when putting the "glue" onto the parts of you figure though, as this will dry white.
6. Assemble the pieces of your figure! Start by stading the skirt/base upright and sticking the two circles of the over-skirt to it with the icing glue.
7. Stick the torso to the skirt. As his piece is quite heavy, it is best to hold it in place for a few seconds to allow the icing to go tacky and hold it in place.
8. Pinch one end of each arm flat, and spread a little icing glue to the flat end. Stick these to the torso, overlapping slightly to create shoulders.
9. Assemble the pieces of the head seperatley. Stick the hair onto the head, flattening down as much as possible at the back, and curling up at the front to creat a fringe. Use the icing glue to stick the bun to the back of the hair, and the headnband just behind the fringe. Use a cocktail stick to make two holes for eyes.
10. Stick the head to the torso with the icing glue, and then stick the sleeves over the shoulders. Hey presto, you're all finished! Try not to handle the figure too much whilst the icing glue is drying, and keep it in an airtight container until it's ready to use!

I made my Cinderella figure the night before I made the actual cake as it saves time and the icing keeps well. So I've decided to post this "not-really-a-cake" post the night before the actual cake post goes on too, but I thought you might like to see a preview of the finished product (even though it didn't work out as planned - but more on that tomorrow!)

Happy Thoughts

x