Minnie & Mickey Birthday Cakes

It's been a few months since I properly decorated a cake but I've been getting back into the swing of things this week with these cute Minnie and Mickey Mouse cakes. They were for a joint third birthday party for a boy and a girl.

I've described the method previously for similar stacked cakes so I'll just give a brief overview of how they were made. I started with two slabs of cake and cut around the cake board to give three circles of cake for each of the individual cakes. These three layers were then stacked on each of the cake boards and sandwiched with buttercream and raspberry jam before crumb coating the outside and placing in the fridge, for half an hour or so, to firm up ready for the sugarpaste covering.

 

Each cake is made up of a 7 inch cake on top of a 9 inch and the board at the bottom is 12 inches. In order to support the top cake and stop it sinking into the cake below, there are three dowels in each of the bottom cakes. The board was covered in icing separately to the 9 inch cake sitting on it, the cake went on first and then the board was iced around it.

 

The little Minnies and Mickeys around the bottom tier of the cake were cut out using a sugarpaste cutter that I found on amazon. They are cut  out of black flower paste which is stronger than sugarpaste and can therefore be rolled more thinly. Mickey was then finished with a bow tie and Minnie with the bow in her hair, these were again made out of white flower paste that I coloured up. They're stuck on with royal icing and then Minnie's bow was finished with small piped dots of royal icing.

Normally for a birthday cake I might personalise it with a name around the cake board at the bottom  with the letters being cut out with tappits but I thought that with everything else going on this might look a bit crowded. So I opted for a simple initial on the top of each cake which I was very pleased with as when I added them it just finished off the cakes! 

Finally, for the bows and ears on top I used flower paste again. I cut out the ears using a circle cutter and made the bow out of three separate pieces of paste. Two to make the side loops and one to wrap around the middle. The bow is stuck together using edible glue. All these pieces were left to harden overnight before being attached with royal icing. Here is a bow tutorial from the food network using only two separate pieces of paste which is good for smaller bows. The demo uses sugarpaste which is useful if you just want your bow to sit flat on top of a cupcake for example, but for all other bows where you want it to sit up with a bit of shape or you want to stick it on the side of a cake, you'd have to use flowerpaste. To keep the shape of the bow whilst it's drying you can also roll up some kitchen paper and pop it through each loop until it's set.

I was pleased with the finish cakes but had to brave the elements this weekend to deliver them which is never ideal!

 

The inspiration for the design came from Byrdie Girl Custom Cakes, although there seems to be many similarly designed cakes online.