Tangled Rapunzel Tower Birthday Cake

Happy 4th birthday to my daughter!

As per her request, I had to make her a special cake.  She told me that she wanted a tall cake with fondant (yep, she knows and loves fondant!).  And it had to have a princess on it.  And it had to be Rapunzel (from the Disney movie, Tangled).  I told her yes, I could make that.

Yikes!  No WAY!  What was I thinking?!  I couldn't believe I had told my almost-four-year-old that I could make something like that.  I had no idea how to make it, and didn't know if I could find the time to do it.  Well, as most of you moms out there know, where there's a will, there's a way.  And my will was looking up at me with her big blue-gray eyes, saying "Please, Mommy!".  Ah, the things we do for our kids!  So I decided that I would make this cake happen, even if I didn't know what I was doing.

I took a screenshot of the tower from Tangled (the photo on the left) to use as my reference point.  I also found some great tower cakes at cakecentral.com that inspired me, too.  There are some really creative people out there!
















I began with making fondant/gumpaste flowers.  Lots of them in pink, purple, fuchsia, and yellow.  And in different sizes.  I made a slew of tiny yellow dots for the centers of the flowers.  I also made lots of green leaves.  

 I am a huge fan of these flower cutout tools!

Allowing the flowers to dry in my flower former.

 Yep.  There's enough pink flowers here!

 Now for the green leaves.

 I really like the contrast of the green and purple here.

Here is a flower with the yellow dot placed in the middle.  So cute!

 Now for the fondant to cover the cakes.  I really like how the green gel coloring swirls in the white fondant.  It reminds me of marble (stone).

And after about 10 minutes of kneading, the fondant is a nice shade of green.

 Now I need gray fondant, so I add some black gel coloring to white fondant.  Again, I love how the swirling patterns make this look like marble!  I must make a marble cake soon.

 And again, after about 10 minutes of kneading, I have gray fondant.

Looks like a rock!  But much more tasty, and not nearly as hard.  :)

 Now for the cake.  I used a 9" cake pan for this tier.  When stacked like this, it's a little over 4" tall.

 Applying the crumb coat.

Fully crumb coated and ready for the fondant.

 I had two portions of green fondant.  One for the lower tier, and another for the upper tier.

 My fondant draped over my cake.

Smoothed on.and nicely fitted.  See that wad of fondant in the front of the cake?  I used it to help smooth the fondant onto the cake.  For me, it actually worked better than using the fondant smoother.  The smoother is great for creating a crisp finish at the bottom.  The chunk of fondant helps to create a nice finish all over.

Using a pizza cutter, I trimmed away the excess fondant.  Tier One is ready to decorate!

 Here's my gray fondant, rolled out.  I'm using a cobblestone fondant impression mat to create a stone effect here.

All done and ready to be trimmed so I can put it on the cake.

And here is the stone trim applied.  I glued it on with a Gum-Tex and water solution.  It worked perfectly to keep the fondant in place.

 Now comes some fun decorating!  Using the same Gum-Tex glue solution, I glued on the flowers and leaves (as well as the yellow centers) around the cake.  So pretty!

All done!  I could have stopped making the cake here, but my daughter wanted a TALL cake.  So I kept going.

 Tier two added.  This was a 6" cake, covered with fondant in the same way as the first tier.

Tier two covered in flowers.  Should I stop here?  Nay, I say!  A tall cake it must be!

So I kept going.