Tiara baby shower cake

Meridiths Baby Shower and Tiara Cake

   
             My friend Claudia's daughter, Meredith, is having a baby shower this weekend. Claudia has asked me to decorate the cake. We work well as a tag team.. She does really well with baking the cakes, and I do well with icing and decorating. This will be the second time we work together on a cake. She helped me in January with my sons wedding cakes. We made 4 cakes. 2 of them were coconut cakes and the grooms cake was a lemon raspberry and the brides cake was a lemon blueberry cake.. They did not even  touch the two lemon cakes. I wrapped them tight and froze them for 5 months and brought the cakes to them by car from Florida to Atlanta.

Josh and Anne Wedding cakes      

             Meridith wants a Tiffany box cake with a tiara on top. I made 3 tiaras and a bow out of fondant ahead of time to make sure it would hold up. I got an oatmeal container and printed out a diagram of a tiara from here. I taped it to the oatmeal container. I stabilizer the container with gripper paper so it would not move. I then taped  wax paper on top of the  diagram. I smeared a little of crisco over the wax paper so the fondant would have something to stick to. I got out my fondant, rolled it out. When i tried to hand roll it, it didn't work for me. It kept tearing and breaking when i would put it on top of the design especially when i tried to make the curls. So i gave up on trying to do it by hand. I then tried the clay extruder. I couldn't believe how hard it was to push the fondant out. The smaller the die hole i used the harder it was to push it out. This was the only one I could find around here. Please do not get this one if you do not have strong hands. The  ropes that come out of the extruder were very symmetrical. I liked that. It still wasn't very flexible especially when curling it. I finally finished. I repeated it 2 more times on different size cans and different size diagrams. I waited 3 days for it to dry.

1. diagram of tiara 2. fondant 3. white chocolate 4. split cake 

             After 3 days I cut the wax paper from both ends and gently removed the tiara. It crumbled to pieces. Well, that didn't work. I went back to youtube and watched so more videos on tiara making. I somehow missed the part that it was suppose to made of gum paste. After purchasing gum paste I repeated the same process all over again. The clay extruder wasn't any easier, but the gum paste was a little easier to curl.
            I also tried to make the tiaras out of white chocolate. I melted down the chocolate in a double boiler with a little coconut oil. That was my mistake. I put the chocolate in a piping bag with a small tip and traced out the design. My hands are too shaky to do this. I again repeated it 2 more times in different sizes. It is suppose to harden withing a couple of hours. After 3 days it still would not harden. I removed them from the can. Replaced the wax paper and melted the chocolate this time in the microwave by itself. Put it in the piping bag with a small tip and traced it  out again. It seemed to be getting harder faster. The next day, I removed the wax paper and it crumbled. I gave up on the white chocolate. After 5 days the last batch of gumpaste tiaras were removed from the cans. I was so surprise to see that it held together. I was so excited and relieved. My strong suggestion to anyone who is doing this for the first time and doesn't have a whole lot of experiece with fondant or gumpaste is to start 2 weeks in advance just to get the hang of it. I started a week ahead of time and got lucky that one of the 9 tiaras i made held together.

            2 days before the shower I made the frosting and tinted it light pink. Very pretty. My friend Claudia baked the cakes and Friday I frosted and decorate the cake. I had great difficulty frosting this cake...It was a white box cake mix and for whatever reason it was too moist. She used  2 inch square cake pans, but it did not rise up to 2 inches. After leveling them each layer was only one inch thick...The cake split in  half when i tried to put the top layer on. I used frosting to fuse it back together. then I tried frosting it...The frosting kept picking up the cake and making it break off. I thought surely this will not work. After much diligence and praying I finally got the frosting to stick in the right places. It no longer would pass for a tiffany box as uneven as it was. So we winged it. We added the black and white polka dotted ribbon at the bottom  with the fondant bow and put the tiara on top. We used  pearl candies to try and hide some of the imperfections of the frosting.

              Below is the card I made for Meridith for the baby shower. 2nd picture is the inside of the card.