Cake Progress And A Money Saving Tip For Texture Mats

I have been working on the fondant pieces of the kid’s birthday cakes on and off over the last few days.

Some of these pieces really had to get done, so they can be dried pretty hard by this time next week. The cakes and pieces have to travel, so they need to be extra sturdy! I have however decided to do a lot of assembly on site, just to make transportation less stressful and leave less opportunity for collapse!

 

Anyway, since Anna’s Castle cake requires the most fragile fondant work, her cake has currently taken over a little as the structural pieces are really important!

 

As you can see, I made some more pointy roofs, and the rest of the tower pieces. These have now dried for a good 3 days and even though they are nowhere near dry, they are much more sturdy than they were.

 

 

First of all the turrets’ roof décor.

The twirly roofs are for the middle turret, which will be in the center of a double tier cake, so it doesn’t need to be as tall as the others. I made two, in case one breaks.

The other roofs are for the outside turrets and I kept the décor nice and easy on that one. Basically I just rolled out a piece of fondant, cut out some more or less evenly spaced notches with the long end of a “L” cookie cutter.

 

 

Then afixed it to the covered cone and finished it off with some small purple flowers.

 

 

 

The 4 corner towers are at this point dry enough to hold their shape pretty well, but still soft enough for me to CAREFULLY press the brick pattern in with the back of a paring knife.

 

 

I also took the opportunity to put on a window! I cut out the middle turret’s window, but for the outside ones I will affix them in this way.

 

 

 

So the outside turret, flanking the four corners of the castle will look like this:

 

 

And the middle turret will look like this:

 

 

Turns out I also needed LOTS more of the little flowers, so I got a start on those:

 

 

I was debating getting a texture mat for the “wood” texture I was going to need for both of these cakes, but wasn’t really too happy with the expense, considering that I may not need it again.

Well, eventually I remembered that I had bought a wood grain acrylic stamp a few weeks ago on sale ($2) and hadn’t even used it yet. Turns out it worked great as a texture mat on the fondant! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? DUH!?

Stamps are often SO much cheaper than texture mats and work beautifully! There was NO sticking and you hardly need to press at all. Stamps tend to have deeper grooves than texture mats, so you can really determine how deep you want an impression simply by how much you press down!

 

 

 

So, that’s where I am at on the cakes today. I also made a few more “bricks” for the Angry Bird Cake and a TNT box, but I’ll update you on the progress of that cake when I have a bit more to show for!

 

Have a joyful day everyone!