My beautiful niece Melody (yes, we have the same name) turned 5 years old yesterday and I had the privilege of making her birthday cake.  She is definitely a girly girl so I thought I would do pink, purple, and green for the colors and do a flower/princess theme for the cake.  I really haven’t done many fondant cakes before, since I am not a huge fan of the taste, but I wanted the cake to look a certain way and so I thought that fondant would be the best choice for it.  The birthday girl loved the cake and so my mission was accomplished!  

I am going to share a couple techniques that I used to get some of the details of the cake…hopefully they help you out.  First, I think that covering the cake board that the cake sits on top of looks so much better when it is covered in fondant, so that it matches the rest of the cake.  I taped two cake boards on top of each other so the base would be more stable and then put a little glucose on the board to make sure the fondant stuck well (you can also use cornsyrup).  You can roll your fondant quite thin to cover the board and then you just cut off the excess with a knife.  I then added ribbon to the edge of the board to give it a cleaner look.  Simply rub your glue stick on the ribbon and adhere.

I then covered my cakes in buttercream and rolled the fondant out to about 1/8″-1/4″ thick.  I covered the cakes in three different colors of fondant to give it a fun look, but you could cover it all in the same color if you wanted.  I placed the bottom cake layer on the board and then inserted cake dowels into the cake and cut them to match the same height as the cake.  (Note: all the cakes have a cardboard cake circle under them) I then stacked the middle layer on top and doweled that too.   

I used the leftover fondant to make various sizes of flowers and then adhered them with a dab of water.  Next I made large pearls to go around the bottom.  To make the pearls you need to roll your fondant out to about 1/4″-1/2″ and then cut out circles with a small circle cutter.  You can play around with the size of the pearls depending on the thickness of your fondant and the size of your cutters.

To make the tiara I rolled out fondant to about 1/8″ thick and then stamped it with a swirly design stamp.  Next, I cut out the shape with my crown/tiara cookie cutter and trimmed the bottom so that it was straight across.  Next, I placed the tiara on a cup with a small width and let it dry for a couple hours until it was stable.  I adhered the tiara to the top of the cake with a dab of water or you can use tylose glue. I also added small dragees to the top of the tiara with a dab of buttercream to adhere.  In some of the photos you can see that later on I added a small “M” on the tiara for “Melody”.  I made this by forming fondant into the shape I wanted. 

I was going to leave the cake like this, but then I decided to add some funky leaves and dots in green and I’m really glad I did because I think it made it “pop” a lot more.

To make the leaves and dots I just colored some of my leftover buttercream green and added it to a pastry bag with a #2 tip.  Here are a couple of close up photos of the designs so you can see how I did them.

I also forgot to mention that before I piped the leaves and dots I brushed the whole cake with pearl luster dust to give it that extra shimmer and shine.  Hopefully these tips help you out next time you make a cake!