Princess Dress Cake for a Birthday

Cake is right at the height where it looks like it's part of her outfit. Love that :)

It was only about a year ago that I learned what fondant was. I noticed a pin for a recipe on how to make marshmallow fondant. I decided to try my hands on making ruffle flowers out of fondant for the topping on my mom's birthday cake. This was how it all started.

This weekend, my niece had her 8th birthday party with her friends. She has never had a themed birthday cake before. I was responsible for making her very first themed cake so I wanted to make it special. Now I don't have a little girl of my own but if I did, I would definitely want her to have some kind of princess or fairytale cake for one of her birthdays. Once again I wanted to make something that was pretty but easy enough for a beginner cake maker like myself. This cake would be my fifth fondant cake and fourth theme cake. The hulk cake was my fourth fondant cake. See? I can still count them because I have made so few! Lol.

Here was my inspiration for the cake:

After correcting for many errors and imperfections, here was how my princess dress cake turned out:

When I go into improvisation mode, things and in some cases many things end up changing. The cake I modeled against ended up getting scratched and I did everything I could to make "my cake" look decent. Ahem. For instance, my fondant did not follow the recipe since I thought I would try cutting down on the sugar this time. Then my almost 4 year old suggested I add milk to it, which I thought was a pretty cool idea so I added some whipping cream that was leftover from the cupcakes I made a couple of days ago. I also added a few drops of strawberry oil flavor to it. The fondant smelled and tasted great and it wasn't that sweet but boy, was it darn sticky! Omg. Now it would have been fine if I was only covering the cake in small pieces, like what I did with the bottom tier, but for the big piece on the top tier, it was kind of a nightmare. The thing was sticking to the table and it got stretched in random areas on its way over the top of the cake. There goes the smooth fondant covering I was fantasizing about. Lesson learned!

I just couldn't ruffle this fondant. Too soft!

My attempt at hiding imperfections. Lol.

Funny how the colors change in different lighting.

The above cake that inspired me is so much cooler. I'm a bit sad my cake ended up looking so different :( Luckily, in the end my princess dress cake was still somewhat recognizable and cute. I was afraid it would be hideous at one point! Omg. The $1.25 tiara I bought from the dollar store made it prettier too :) Score! Also, all the girls loved it at the party! I think my dress cake actually looked a little less baby and a bit more grown-up overall. Or maybe not. It's not as cute anyway. It did taste good though. I'm not a big fan of plain vanilla cakes but this new recipe I tried was quite nice.

Cake Details:

Fluffy white vanilla cake (with less sugar)
Swiss meringue buttercream (with less sugar), some strawberry puree added to half of it
Strawberry marshmallow fondant
Candy pearls