Beauty and the Beast Cake

Tale as old as time

True as it can beeee

Can you tell what the theme of this cake is? 😛

Someone asked me to make this Beauty and the Beast cake for a birthday party. Beauty and the beast is the birthday girls favourite fairy tale, so we thought: what the hey, let’s make a beauty and the beast themed cake!

When I was brainstorming for the design, I wanted to avoid the cliche and overdone princess style cake as much as possible. I’m talking bout those cakes where the cake is in a dome shape to look like a dress and then the top half of a doll body is stuck onto the top of it. I wanted to just adopt the theme and make something classic and romantic. Hopefully, I have captured that in this cake.

I spent wayyyy too much time to make this cake. We’re talking 25+ hours, the number is too embarassing for me to say. The main part that took up a lot of time was the decorating. I am NEVER working with fondant again. Fondant is a bee yautch. I knew I hated it for a reason. But something weird came over me and I suddenly I wanted to try the very thing that I’ve been avoiding: fondant. 

As unpleasant an experience as it was, I did learn a few things:

1. Do not stack the fondant decorations that you just spend 5 hours to make. They will stick together and then you’ll have to start all over again. That happened to me (durh) and, in my frustration, I wanted to pull all my hair out. 

2. When fondant is sticky, DO NOT add more icing sugar in the hopes to dry it up a bit. Icing sugar only makes it worst. Instead, use cornstarch. It will tame your fondant.

3. Storing a fondant covered cake in the fridge is a no-no. You’ll end up with “sweaty” fondant. Luckily, I learnt of this before I covered my cake in fondant.

4. Making fondant decorations is a tedious task.

5. It is impossible to cover a cake in fondant without wrinkling it.

Ok so maybe #4 and #5 were just complaints 😛

The fondant wasn’t the only thing that refused to cooperate, the royal icing was revolting against me too! I tried to make a dome out of royal icing to resemble the glass case that contained the rose in the movie. I piped a dome design over a metal bowl then let it set for 2 days to harden. However, when I tried to remove the dome from the bowl, the whole thing just shattered! Augh, talk about frustrating!

Jay, who ordered the cake, made a makeshift dome out of wires after he heard about my plight. I wish I was that innovative! I was way too fixated on creating a cake that was all-edible.

Completing a cake NEVER FELT SO GOOD. By the end of it, I actually swore off baking and said that “I’M NEVER GONNA BAKE AGAIN!”

But we all know that’s a total lie.