Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom Cake
I made this for my daughter's fourth birthday. I think it is still the most elaborate cake that I have made (at least by my own standards).
The modelled characters: I spent about 3 hours each night for 2 weeks modelling the characters and other bits an pieces that went on the cake and cupcakes. Essentially I used Debbie Brown's techniques to construct each character and used images from the cartoon itself and Google images of Ben and Holly cakes to inspire the finished faces and details such as the wand. For the wings, I did use white fondant but I just didn't like the solid look so I used baking paper cut into the shape of wings and stuck them on with sugar glue instead. You could probably use rice wafers as well but I didn't have any on hand. I must admit that the first Holly I made was a total disaster and after 2 days of working on her I decided I should start over as it was too hideous to use! I was at that point thinking what my backup would be if the next attempt failed! A little tip- I kept the figures from my first modelling experience. As a newbie I found that they were a great help in figuring out how to do it all again- months after my Debbie Brown masterclass. I kept these figures to so that I can use them as a reference for the next cake.
The cake: A white chocolate mud cake with white chocolate ganache. My daughter doesn't like chocolate so its pretty much always a white cake of some description! It was covered in white fondant and dusted with petal dust to achieve the mossy green look on the cake. The 'grass' effect ribbon around the cake base was basically a strip of dark green fondant laid around the cake and then indented with an icing tip.
Party Food: Jelly- lots of it. Cookies which were prettied up by sticking on printed icing circles onto.
Decorations: I spent a week (an hour or two each day) cutting out felt tulips and coloured card grass and leaves and attaching them to the wall with BluTac and sticky tape. I picked up synthetic grass from the landscape shop rather cheaply as I was able to get offcuts (which were throughly washed before laying on the tables). I picked up party bags, toadstools and little wooden ladybug pegs from the dollar store. The food table was also covered in fake grass and dotted with flowers and bugs. Once again the dollar store proved to be a great source for the very pretty paper serving platters.