Japanese Pagoda Cake

Back in January 2010 I made a cake  for our friends’ son’s 10th Birthday, and since Tyler likes Japanese culture I made him  a Blue – White Japanese Pagoda Cake. I researched online and put together a design; originally I wanted to make a 3 tier cake but you know how it is, things always don’t pan out how we’d planned.

Cake is madeira cake filled with strawberry jam and  Swiss buttercream.

I used Marshmallow fondant to cover the cake.
I carved the top tier to form a roof platform for the blue roof shingles. Originally I made the roof from fondant, but I met with some terrible drying issues so I ended up making royal icing transfers, that at the end worked out pretty good.

 For the door I used an existing design that I found online. Total I made 4 doors. It took me forever to make them.:-)

 

Here you can see the roof shingles I made from royal icing, they were super brittle, but dried hard enough to hold in place without bending. I think roof is my favorite part of this cake,  and added dimension created a 
nice authentic look.
I let the roof parts to dry for about 12 hours,

Royal Icing Recipe Step by Step Tutorial

Other thing that I wanted to add to the cake was the balcony, and so once again I made the railing using royal icing transfers, these were even more delicate than the roof,  I made some spare ones just in case the accident would occur. Surprisingly nothing broke.
I also made curly cues, using royal icing, once dried I painted them with gold luster dust.
You may have noticed that  I used zig zag motive on most of the cake decorations.
In this case zig zag represents dragon’s tail. I wanted to incorporated dragon’s motive into the cake ;
some of the details were enhanced by painting them with gold luster dust.

How to use luster dust?

At the end I decided to add a personal touch  using Kanji Symbols for number 10 and name Tyler. I researched online for the correct symbols, I have to admit I’m still not sure if these are correct or not, but they added an extra charm to the whole design.

Roof drying set up.
I used royal icing to “glue” all the decorations to the cake.Bottom tier roof required about 30 minutes to set so I used some card boards to hold each roof piece in place during the drying process.

JAPANESE PAGODA CAKE