Mila & Jasmine

For every one of our kids’ birthdays, I have some fun with decorating the cake. Kim makes the cake these days, and people couldn’t stop raving about how good the cake tastes.

Mila is still very much into the Disney princesses, and after last year’s Moana, she now wanted a cake with princess Jasmine.

As with previous cakes, I wanted to try something new, and this year, we tried to add an ombre effect to the cake. This meant getting a cake stand that could spin and a few tools to help smoothen the surface.

I relied heavily on this YouTube tutorial to make the topper. And it’s pretty evident that I’ll never be a professional — nor do I aspire to be one.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learnt:

• Splitting up harder structures over a few days with drying in between them actually made them a lot stronger. I’ll definitely try to repeat this.
• Last minute deciding to add clouds and using marshmallows for that is a bad idea. It worked in the end, but it caused quite a bit of stress as the marshmallows weren’t firm enough; the combination of the difference in drying time between the fondant and the marshmallows resulted in more cracks than I wanted.
• Gum paste and fondant are not the same. I went for gum paste this year for all the modeling and that worked much better than previous years.
• Working with buttercream icing for the ombre effect was pretty easy for the basics. Getting a very smooth result and effect was way harder.

Here are some pics of the process and the result.