The Princess and the Frog Cakes

I love love love The Princess and the Frog movie, so when an acquaintance of mine asked me to do a Princess Tiana cake, I was super excited! I had done a Bratz doll cake before and I wanted to try another doll cake with lots of fondant work on the dress. I wanted it to be fru-fru and detailed since I wasn't experienced enough to do all that nonsence when I did the first doll cake. As soon as she said "The Princess and the Frog", all these ideas came bellowing into my head for the design.

She'd decided that she wanted strawberry cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. This is one time when I didn't mind when she told me to just "..do what you do!" when it came time for her opinion on the design. I already knew what I wanted to do anyway! Lol. Although sometimes plans don't really go the way you expect them to.......

Originally I'd planned on making a 10'' base cake decorated to look like the bottom of a carousel music box and have Princess Tiana standing on top of that cake. If I could make her turn around like she was dancing that would have been the coolest thing EVER! Delusions of gradeur I'm afraid.

Problem # 1. A 10'' base cake plus the full batch that would go to make the Princess dress would be too much cake.

Ok, I'll make the base cake an 8'' round instead and stack the princess dress cake on top of that. It'll be fine..

WRONG-O!!

Problem #2- The bottom of the dress cake is 8'' around. That'll just make for one tall doll cake!

Well crap! Ok, I"ll do the princess cake and then put Frog Prince cupcakes all around.

YEAH RIGHT!

Problem #3- I am NOT making a bunch of little Frog Princes to decorate those cupcakes. I've got too much to do!

Well, it looks like we're going to have two different cakes here. One Princess Tiana cake and one Frog Prince cake. They can just hang out next to eachother! And that's what I did. I baked an 8'' round cake for the Frog Prince.

Decorating was fun!! I got to make a little frog sculpture with his little crown. And lilly pads and vines and flowers and all that jazz! For the princess dress, I printed out a picture of Princess Tiana and used that as my inspiration. I bought a real Princess Tiana doll to put in the middle of the dress. I just wrapped the legs up in some plastic wrap before I plunged it into the dress cake! I made layer after layer of different colored fondant to make sure that I got the effect that I wanted. I did have to peel some off when I realized that I was making her waist bigger with all that fondant! Lol. I couldn't resist adding the gold shimmer dust!

AND then there was the Frog Prince! Purple and green seem to be the common colors for the Princess and the Frog cakes that I googled.....so let's go with that. Can't beat purple buttercream! I love purple and green together anyway. I also decided to write her name in green frosting like and pipe some vines coming off of a couple letters. There would be vines all over this cake anyway, with a large lilly pad on top harboring the wonderful Frog Prince! I threw on a couple of left over flowers that my girls helped make for Tiana's dress.

As much as I wanted to, putting the crown on that frog's head was not an option at this point. I had about run out of energy. Did I mention, most of the cakes that I did during the summer were done on the weekend....when we had soccer tournaments to attend??! This was no exception. Duties of a soccer family. The pick-up was right after the tournaments Championship game ( my daughter's team won! Yay Madi!).
In the end, I was super happy with how these cakes turned out. My husband said that the princess cake was the best cake I'd ever done! Well thanks, honey! :)

I'm still working on posting a bunch of pre-blog cakes that I really enjoyed working on.

Thank you to Shay for letting me create Angelina's cake! Hope I get to out-do myself next year :)
Until next time, Cheers!