Elsa's Frozen Ice Palace Cake

Let it Go. Let it Go! Hooray, another Frozen cake. This time it's Elsa's Frozen ice palace. The cake looks fancy but it's actually really easy to make! It does require some advanced planning though, because the "icicles" need to have time to dry before you can stand them up on the cake without them drooping. 

Frozen Ice Palace Cake

The cake is two tiers of vanilla butter cake filled with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. After dirty icing the cake and letting it chill, I only had to add a fondant "lid" on top of each cake instead of covering the whole thing because the sides would be covered in "icicles" anyway. 

Elsa's Ice Palace

To make the icicles, I marbled white and sky blue fondant together without mixing them up too much, so that there's a distinctive white and distinctive blue part on each. I rolled it out thin and cut long rectangles out, slightly taller than the height of the cakes. Cut the tops off the rectangles to make them pointy.

There's Elsa!

For the "ice" on top of the cake, after I cut the fondant out, I draped the pieces over a large beer mug (with smooth sides) so that they would dry with a nice curve. For the door, I rolled out a snake of white fondant, then curled he ends up to make fancy swirls.  After leaving the pieces to dry overnight in air-conditioning, I stood them up on the cake. I used royal icing to secure the top pieces on the upper tier of the cake. 

lettering details

Details like three sizes of snowflakes and a teeny star-shaped doorknob give this Ice Palace a little more Frozen feeling. To give the cake a more finished look, I also covered the cake board with a thin layer of white fondant. I used a silicone mold for the letters in "Happy Birthday" and letter cutters to make the birthday girl's name in the same marbled blue and white fondant. 

Toy figurines of the characters in the Frozen movie were placed around the cake, with Elsa taking the top spot, of course, since it is her ice palace!

The happy birthday girl celebrated her special day at school with her parents and all her classmates. The teachers apparently wouldn't stop taking pictures of the cake! I'm also amazed how the teachers managed to cut and portion out only the top 5" tier of the cake to feed the entire class, with the birthday girl's parents taking home the 7" bottom tier for an impromptu second birthday cake celebration at home. 

Happy 4th Birthday, Yunxi!