Personalizing makes all the difference

After the scrabble cake, I’ll admit that I was feeling a little “decorated out” and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to pull things together for the second cake I needed to make this past week.  I knew when I volunteered to make it that the two were going to be back to back, but there was no way I was going to miss out on making a cake to celebrate another of my work colleagues and friends moving on to a new job. 

I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on prep work and we’d already decided on a castle theme since Pam’s new job is working in the ivory tower of policy.  Thankfully, about three years ago, I bought Wilton’s Romantic Castle Cake Set when it was on sale cheap at Walmart.  I browsed the ideas on the Wilton website and found their Friendly Fortress Castle Cake idea.  It wasn’t quite what I was looking for but it gave me some great ideas, especially using sugar cubes for the battlements around the top.   The biggest source of inspiration it gave though was how simple the basic design could be as long as I personalized a couple of critical items. 

A little “grass” around the bottom to finish the fondant that I had hand scored to give the effect of stone walls, the Policy banner flying high, and, a princess in her tower, wearing a purple princess dress with matching detailing on the turret peaks. 

I picked the colour and style of the princess dress based on the Halloween costume that made an appearance from Pam’s closet a few weeks ago.  I’ve only made fondant people a couple of times before … oddly one of those was for another castle cake for one of my nieces … and they looked more like the wooden Fisher Price Little People from my childhood.  I wanted to make sure that this figure was a closer reflection of my colleague.  A toothpick in the centre provided some structural stability to allow a narrower shape and I made the hair in several pieces that I scored using the backside of a shell fondant tool to give a texture that looked a lot like hair. One of the back pieces of hair even got a haircut after she was on the cake and I realized that it was much longer then the other sections.

The end result was a cake I could be proud of and one that drew lots of laughter when we presented it at the office to celebrate the our policy princess.