Rapunzel Tower/Tangled Cake

I was asked to make a Tangled Rupunzel cake for a birthday a few weeks ago. There were a couple of ideas sent to me, one was a regular, pretty two tiered cake, the other had the tangled tower. Though they offered me an easy out thinking that the tower might be too hard, I didn't take the out and quoted prices for each one. Turned out the birthday girl preferred the tower cake and decided on that one. Oh no!

I planned this one for a couple of days before I started. I knew I would need some sort of base for the tower or it would just sink into the cake or perhaps just fall off and topple over. We decided to make a base with a wooden dowel that would go up the center of the cake, holding both the cake and tower in place and creating support for both.

The tower is made of three plastic dowels, fondant and rice crispies. I made a few shades of grey for the cobblestone siding, and started sticking small balls of each colour to the tower. The little hut on top was made of crispies and covered with fondant. Each shingle done individually. It was a good idea to start this a couple days before the cake was due, as it gave it time to set and become stronger.

The base of the cake is double layered chocolate, with chocolate filling in between. It came out wonderfully symmetrical - which is always important to me. I feel a perfect base creates a great looking cake. After sliding the tower on top of the cake, I began to add details like the grass, flowers and of course Rapunzel herself. Something that seemed harder than I had thought was her hair. It was so long that the weight of it would make it break and fall to the ground. I ended up doing a much thicker piece of hair in order to make it stay together - not what I had envisioned, but it worked in the end.

In the end, I was very happy with this one! It gave me a bit of a challenge but it was really fun to do.