Carousel Cake with my pretty pretty horses :-)

Do you love to ride the Carousel or as I like to call it , a Merry-go-round? We simply love it...specially my lil Appu, he screams with glee as the little rabbit or pony he's riding goes up and down as we go round and round, and I simply love the carousel music and all the lovely mirrors and colorful animals. Do you have a favorite animal or seat on the carousel? Mine is definitley the pretty horses :-)

When a friend asked me to make a Carousel Cake for her daughter's first birthday, I was simply excited. My mind flooded with ideas, I even went overboard thinking I could try and make the carousel  to move on top of the cake...Lol!! (This carousel on the cake doesn't move btw) :-)

I bought a Wilton's Carousel set with horses (which made half the cake making easy). My friend also shared an image she found online , which helped me a lot with how to proceed with this cake. As it was for her daughter, I chose baby girl shades of pastel colors and went with a combo of White, Lavendar, baby Pink, baby Yellow and baby Green. The main tasks involved with this cake was decorating the Carousel tent and pillars, decorating the horses, making the central pillar and ofcourse the cake.

I initially considered using Royal Icing for decorating the tent and horses, and made Royal Icing...but as the tent was sloping, the royal icing wasn't setting well and kept slightly drooping down and it became an absolute mess, so off I went and washed off all the royal icing (that was a sad night for me , as I wasn't sure what to do next)  So next day I made regular White Marshmallow Fondant and used Gel colors to make green , yellow and pink fondant. I used the royal icing to stick the Fondant to the carousel tent  (atleast my royal icing din't go waste)

Then came painting the four horses. I wanted the horses to look pretty and shiny, so I bought edible glitters in Gold and Lilac shades and used lemon juice to form a sort of glitter paint and painted them on the horses. I painted two horses with Gold mane-Lilac saddle and the other horses with Lilac manes-Gold saddles and Green ropes for both.
(I had shared a snap that night while I was painting the horses on my facebook page and several people were curious to know the end result, thank you friends :-) )
This was the most difficult task I would say, as the horses had very delicate and intricate designs and the glitter paint wouldn't stick so easily and kept smudging...so I had to paint once, let it dry the whole night and re-paint them again the next day to make them brighter. I used green food color for the ropes/belt around the horse.

For the central pillar I cut out two boards into a 4inch diamter and wrapped Lavendar ribbon around it. Then I used a baby pink shaded card stock paper and rolled it to form the pillar, stuck it on top of the board and decorated it with various fun stickers of flowers and butterflies :-) The pillars were decorated with lavendar ribbons.

The cake was the best ever Chocolate cake you've ever eaten, moist and chocolatey - paired with my favorite Chocolate Buttercream Frosting. ( I'll be doing a separate post for the Cake and frosting recipe, I promise). I covered the cake with homemade Marshmallow fondant and kept the decorations very simple keeping in mind the color combo used for the tent.

There you go friends, a very very beautiful Carousel Cake. I was holding my breath when I placed the Carousel tent on top of the pillars on the cake to see the final outcome of the cake...and oh my gosh, it looked so beautiful. Infact my pictures don't do much justice to how the cake looked in real.
Check out the cake from front and back....what do you think??

My friend was so happy with the cake and everyone at the birthday party loved it. The cake got a lot of compliments for both looks as well as taste...and I'm so happy :-D Hope you all enjoyed it too as much as I did :-)

Check out some of my earlier speciality cakes, both in Fondant and/or Buttercream decorations here.
Just wanted to add a humble note that I have never been to any Cake Baking or Decoration classes ever.


-Manju