My baby girl just turned two, and after much discussion, her brothers, I mean she, decided she wanted a frozen cake. The kids thought I should make an ice castle and all of the figures, but since I am a little more grounded in what my design abilities actually are, we decided on a mountain with store bought figures. While this is a time consuming process, I think it is a cake that most people could recreate. This cake doesn’t have any detail work and is basically just a blob of cake covered in fondant. Here is the process including some of my missteps that will hopefully help you in your cake adventures.
I start with six layers of cake. I made two ten inch cakes, two eight inch, and two six inch. Next time i would probably do either all ten inch or half ten and half eight. I was limited in the shape that I was making by having the smaller cakes. I wanted to give my mountain some ledges and small peaks that I was unable to do by having the descending sizes. I baked these cakes the day before so that they were totally cool and would not fall apart.
I filled my layers with american buttercream. I was attempting to have two different flavors of cake, which I probably won’t do next time. The chocolate crumbs get all over the vanilla cake when I cut the cake down.
This is a basic mountain shape, right? Bonus, you don’t have to make dinner on cake design day, look at all of these scraps that need eating!
I then decided to frost the mountain, at this point my design was lost and I had no clue where I was going.
I am staring at this blob and I know it isn’t right. Obvious next step would be to just dig into the cake.
This looks bad, but I can see it going somewhere in my head. I should frost this, that would be the logical course of action, but I am confused and just proceed with fondant. I used white fondant, with two drops of blue food gel and one drop of black. I just kept kneading until the fondant was a uniform shade. I added powdered sugar as I was kneading to keep it from sticking.
.Then on a surface sprinkled with powdered sugar, I rolled out my fondant.
Onto the mountain blob that went.
I smoothed the fondant onto the mountain and then got to work on another piece for my path.
I then transferred the cake over to my board. I have the cake on a twelve inch cardboard disk that helps with moving it. I am using a large cutting board to hold my creation. I used tinfoil to create little snow mounds.
I used buttercream to stick them to the board, and then I covered them in buttercream. I rolled out my fondant and used a large piece to cover most of the board. I rolled out smaller pieces of fondant so I could go all the way around the cake pinching the fondant seems together. I had one seem right in the front so I put Olaf there with a little pile of fondant snowballs. I also used buttercream around the mountain to cover the seem there
I also spread a little buttercream on the sides of my path to try and smudge the snow into the mountain. I picked up a pack of frozen figures at Target and put them all around the cake. For the “Ice” on top of the mountain I made glass candy that I dyed blue and stuck the shards into the top of the mountain.