Belle Cake!

As soon as my friend casually mentioned that it was her birthday coming up, she was still yet to receive anything baked from me, and her favourite princess was Belle, I was all over baking this Beauty (see what I did there). Very happy that I was indulging in my obsession with all things Disney it didn't take me long to stock up on a whole lot of yellow fondant. I had to accept that from the waist up she was going to have to be made with ready made icing, but luckily I managed to create a skirt huge enough to fit a hefty amount of cake underneath! I used a hemisphere cake tin to create the dome of her dress, stacked on top of two vanilla sponges to give her some height. This created a really smooth base that I didn't have to alter much once it was all assembled with buttercream in between. I then covered her with a generous layer of yellow buttercream and began rolling out quite a thin sheet of yellow fondant. To minimize a lot of bulkly overlapping I cut moon shapes as opposed to circles with varying sized cookie cutters and then positioned the bottom curve just over the concave of the one below it so it fit snugly. It kind of achieves the style of her dress?! Though I think it could be done better...I'm just not sure how! To add a bit of variance I added a touch of orange food colouring and cocoa powder to a section of fondant, creating a slightly darker shade for a lower tier of her skirt. In all honesty the little pink roses were to cover up slight gaps where the buttercream had shown through! But I think they look really pretty anyway :) I also painted a little gold lustre dust onto the broach in the middle of the dress' neckline and her necklace, and finished her off with a sprinkle of pearl edible glitter, because she's a princess...duh. I'm really proud of the way the top of the figure turned out, though to be fair the design of the dress - the drapey off-the-shoulder material bits - were perfect for covering up any messy seams between her arms and shoulders etc. Here's hoping that there are other princesses that wear this style of dress. I liked the design of this one because aside from the top of the figure, I didn't have to use too much fondant on the actual cake. When covering a cake with a continuous sheet I find it difficult to go lower than a 5mm thickness without it tearing, which is a shame because a lot of people aren't keen on the taste of too much fondant. So being able to cover her with much thinner individual sections hopefully meant that she tasted extra yummy :)