My niece has recently turned 3 and for her birthday she wanted a pink Tinkerbell cake. This would be my first ever attempt at making such a cake, so I was glad that this was a joint effort with my mum to accomplish such a task. In the lead up to making the cake we had to source various elements such as the food dyes, fondant, cake board which required trips to the cake supply stores. Then it was time to make the cake...
The Cake
For the cake we used two 23x4cm round butter cakes. Butter cake gives a firm foundation for decorating. The cakes need to be made a day before you need to decorate them as they are much easier to ice and decorate. You can either use a packet mix or can make your cake from scratch.
Butter Cake
125g butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour1/3 cup milk
Have butter at room temperature, beat butter with vanilla until light and creamy, add sugar, beat until light and fluffy, add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in half the sifted flour with half the milk, stir until combined. Add remaining milk and flour and stir lightly, then beat lightly until mixture is smooth. Spoon into greased tin, bake in a 180 degrees C oven until cake is golden, cooking times will vary depending on tin and ovens. The cake is cooked when the sides of the cake are just starting to shrink from the side of the tin and a skewer, when inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Decorating
We purchased white fondant "plastic icing" and coloured it with pink food colouring to the desired shade of pink we wanted, we also did the same for the green fondant for the flowers. It is very simple to dye fondant, it just takes some time as you have to work in the colour slowly until you reach your desired shade. Just remember you can always add colour, you can't take colour out.
Once we had filled the cake with vanilla butter cream and strawberry jam and iced the cake we laid the rolled out fondant over the cake and smoothed it out.
The Tinkerbell was created by using a tracing from a clip art image, we pin pricked the outline onto the cake and piped the outline using white royal icing, and filled in the image using coloured royal icing. White edible glitter was used on Tinkerbell's wings.
The flowers were cut out of green and pink fondant and place on the cake. To make the fondant stick use a very small amount of water.
 |
| Green and Pink Fondant Flowers |
 |
| Pink Tinkerbell Cake |
