A Cake for the Parliamentary Princess

Last week there was a birthday in the office - it was the lovely Amy's birthday. Amy is generally known as the Parliamentary Princess because she is a whizz at managing all of the Parliamentary briefs and papers, and we all depend very much on her.

When it came to making a cake, obviously it had to be a cake fit for a princess... so I made a crown cake!

This design is borrowed from the amazing Paris Cutler of Planet Cake. Her original design was for a circular cake, and the increased space gave room for the letters 'PRINCESS' to be spelt out underneath the crown. However, because I wanted to go with a gluten free, dairy free orange syrup cake that tends to sink in the middle, I went for a loaf shape that would be easier to reverse top to bottom to get a flat top.

Instead of chocolate ganache as a base for the icing, I used very dark (70%) chocolate, melted and poured straight onto the cooled cake. I fiddled with it as little as possible, just leaving it to find its level. It took about an hour to firm up in the fridge. The chocolate tasted really lovely as a coating for the cake, but it made the cake really hard to cut!

Meanwhile I prepared the fondant by kneading in some pink gel colouring.

 

When I started on the crown, I made it in white and planned to coat it in some food-grade gold leaf flakes that I had in the cupboard but had never used. (Paris's design called for gold shimmer dust but I didn't have any.)

But when I tried to apply the gold flakes it was a bit of a disaster. They wouldn't stick on, and when I tried to moisten the surface of the icing to help the adherence, the flakes just rolled up into sticky chunks.

I abandoned the effort and remade the crown in yellow fondant, which worked quite well. The crown was hand cut and hand shaped - I didn't use a stencil, but you could if you wanted.

In the pic you can see the gold leaf experiment in the background and the new yellow crown in the foreground. 

I also made some little stars with a small cutter as additional decoration.

After rolling out the pink fondant and covering the entire top and sides of the cake, I rolled out some thin strips of white fondant, and created 'frills' by running a balling tool down one side (this thins out the fondant on that side and stretches it slightly so it is both thinner and more curvy).

Then, using a little water, I stuck these ribbons in a looped formation around the edges of the top, and finished them off by fixing a flat 'ribbon' at their edges, to hide the messy edge where they joined the pink icing.

I stuck the crown and stars on with a little water, and hey presto! Happy birthday Parliamentary Princess!!