Craft me Happy!: Rapunzel Birthday Cake

Here's a bit of fun for you. Followers of my blog will know that I tried my hand at making Scooby Doo out of sugar a few weeks ago for my husband's 40th birthday cake. Well this week it was Maisie's 5th birthday and, like a fool, I asked her what she'd like on her birthday cake. Of course she replied with Rapunzel. She's all about the Disney Princesses at the moment!

Well Scooby was the first character I've made out of sugar and Rapunzel is the second. Maisie does like to be different though and she insisted that instead of the usual purple dress she should wear a green dress and, for some reason, she should be wearing an apron...

This time, instead of flower paste to make Rapunzel, I made my own modelling paste. It worked out much cheaper and easier, so, unless I'm making very delicate flowers, I'll be using modelling paste from now on.

For the uninitiated, modelling paste is made by mixing 225g of fondant icing with a teaspoon of gum tragacanth or tylose powder and then leaving it to rest for a couple of hours.

For my own reference I decided to take a photograph at nearly every stage to show how she developed and I thought it might be quite effective to turn the photos into a little slide-show.

She was a real learning experience and took a good 3 days to make as I needed to let her dry between putting her dress on and putting on her hair. She's not perfect, her eyes are a bit far apart and bulbous and her mouth looks like she's had a touch too much Botox, but on the whole I'm pretty happy with her.

There's a lot more information about how I made the flowers here.

I am particularly pleased with the base as it was really very easy, but it looks very effective. I just coloured some modelling paste with dark brown until it was a putty colour and then rolled strips of it over a cobble stone impressions mat to give the impression of an old path going around the bottom of the cake. After stretching one side of my strip to get it to curve around, I stuck it to my 9inch cake board with a little water. I then quickly dusted it with some terra cotta and some moss coloured dusting powder.

I laid over a 6inch cake board and cut around it.

Finally I rolled out some plain white icing and cut around my 6inch cake board to fill in the middle gap.

To harden my base quickly, I put it in the oven for an hour at 100 degrees C and then left it to cool. It was then completely hard enough for me to sit my cake on.

Maisie insisted on sticking the candy melt daisies on herself, deciding where they all should go. I think she did a pretty good job!