Step by Step

This is the new Disney Princess Signature Castle Cake. It's $49.99 and expensive for a grocery store cake. As such, I try to spend some time on them making sure they're worth the customer's money.



First you need cake. And icing. Also if this is your first time making this cake (as it was mine) then the instruction card is a good thing to have. Also, you'll need some dowels to stabilize the cake once you've carved and stacked. This step will save you endless trouble during the dirty icing stage.




Carve the cake! Because of the weird shapes, I had to actually piece in some cake to fill a hole left by the carving. I'm convinced the 1/2 sheet cake the people used for the instruction card is NOT the same dimensions we have. Luckily I caught the inconsistency with the size and adjusted. Hence the pieced in square.




Dirty ice the sucker. 'Dirty icing' or 'crumb coating' is when you take a cake that has been (preferably) frozen and coat it in a thin layer of icing to trap all the crumbs. This prevents any cake bits showing up in the final coat of icing and will give your cake a nice finish. After the crumb coat is on, throw it back into the freezer to harden up again.





And if you're a looser like me, remember to put in the ramp as dictated by the instruction card. Then you can put it back in the freezer.




Now that our cake is nice and frozen, it's ready for the final coat of icing! I'm using buttercream here. Because of the horrible humidity, the Bakery will not do any of the signature cakes with the whipped icing. It just doesn't hold up. Once the final coat is applied and smoothed, you can go back and create the desired textures. Here I created a hedge along the bottom border of the cake and then a cobble stone texture down the ramp.





Now we air brush! The colors we have do not 100% match the colors used in the original design (they use olive green, but I only have spring green) so I had to improvise.





Pipe on the bushes, flowers, borders, and cobble stones before placing the kit on the cake.

For the most part, signature cakes do not allow room for a name or message, but if a message is desired by the client it is an option to actually write it on the cake bored (assuming there is room).