Hello Kitty “Wedding” Cake for Bake a Wish

‘Tis the season of giving, so when I saw a request on the Bake a Wish board for a girl turning 11 who wanted a Hello Kitty wedding-style cake (with assurances from the staff that they were only requesting a very small tiered cake with white fondant and green and pink decorations), I snapped it up. After all, I just bought a mini tiered pan set recently so how better to use it than for a donation to a Bake a Wish kid?

It also meant I had an excuse to use several of my prettier molds, plus some Disco dust I won at the 2011 Austin cake show. I’ve never made a wedding cake before since I don’t usually do cakes for sale and tend to skew more to the gross’n’nerdy stuff.

Thus, here is the Hello Kitty “Wedding” cake (name blurred out for security of the recipient):

So it’s not exactly a tiny tiered cake at 13″ tall (not including the figure on top), in part because when I broke out the mini tiered set I decided that wasn’t much cake, so I added a bottom layer cut from a larger pan. Also, the recipient asked for it to be strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, so that meant more cake to make in the first place. Thus I made the base layer one layer of each flavour, then the next two were chocolate, the next one vanilla, and the teeny tiny one at the top is strawberry.

Now I have a bunch of spare cake but that was part of the plan: I will turn that into cakeballs for my husband’s work party this weekend. Win-win!

The Hello Kitty figure is entirely fondant except for a toothpick inside holding her head on, plus obviously painted on the outside. I sprayed her dress with pearl spray and painted some more on the veil, plus I brushed those parts with white Disco dust while the pearl coating was drying.

It’s a deceptively easy figure to make with some basic sculpting skills. I started with a cone with a toothpick pushed all the way through so it could support the head and anchor the figure on the cake. Then I cut some concentric circles in thinly rolled fondant and used a ball tool to flare the edges. I wet those and layered them on the cone, going smaller as I went up.

Two thin sausages made the arms, and a flattened oval made the head. The most common problem I see with failed Hello Kitty figures is a round head. Just look at an actual Hello Kitty picture and it’s easy to see that she has a large oval head.

Then I added two little ears on the sides, again using a picture as reference.

The only advanced part was the veil, which I made with the same mold I used for the lace pieces elsewhere on the cake. It was my first time using that mold and it took several tries to get pieces out intact, but eventually I got the hang of it.

Her bouquet is simply tiny strips of pink fondant rolled into rosettes, fixed to a bit of green pushed into the same leaf border mold used elsewhere on the cake.

I also added some pink Disco dust to some of the hearts, which doesn’t photograph well but sparkles beautifully, especially under LED lights or sunlight.

I’ll be delivering this first thing in the morning to the requesting shelter. As always, we never get to see the recipients, but I hope the birthday girl likes it.