As a child, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was easily in my Top 5 favorite books! Just imagine my delight, when my 9 year-old son picked up a copy and devoured it in about 2 days! He then proceeded to grab the rest of the series and finished the entire set just as quickly! He was even a a couple steps ahead of me because I had never read the entire series. There’s something magical about being a lover of books your entire life and suddenly finding yourself as a mother of a child who also enjoys reading just as much.
It’s almost as magical as that feeling you get while reading Narnia where you feel transported. Where you feel like you yourself are stepping through the wardrobe…
I made this cake using frosting and fondant. Another time I might try to transfer a Narnia picture onto the cake using a buttercream frosting sheet.
Narnia Inspired Cake Tutorial
Materials Needed:
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2-layer cake: cooled, leveled, filled and frosted
1 batch of your favorite buttercream
Wilton food colors: sky blue, leaf green, brown
Wilton fondant: black, white, yellow, brown (you could also just buy white and tint to get the colors you need)
Toothpick
Paring knife
- Start with a 2-layer cake frosted in your favorite white buttercream
- Take a very small amount of leftover buttercream and tint it a pale blue.
- On the top surface of the cake, alternately spread small amounts of pale blue and white buttercream on top half for the sky. Then take an offset spatula to smooth this out. Your colors should blend together to give you a nice marbleized effect. You can go over 2 or 3 times gently, but the more you work it, the more you’ll just blend it into one color which is not what you want. Try to get it fairly smooth by the 2nd or 3rd swipe.
- Fill the remaining bottom half of the cake surface with mostly white buttercream and small highlights of blue. Swirl these colors a little to integrate the blue slightly. Then take the back of your offset spatula and press gently into the buttercream and lift straight up. This will give it a rough appearance like snow on the ground.
- Next take a small amount of buttercream and tint it dark brown for the trees. I used a pastry bag with a #3 tip to pipe the trees but you could also just fill a sandwich baggie and cut a small tip off the one corner to use. Just don’t overthink it when you’re piping them! Quick freehand some trees and they will look great!
- Tint some buttercream green and then use a #352 leaf tip to pipe trees on the top of the cake and around the sides.
- Next, use a toothpick to pick up small amounts of white buttercream and dab onto a few spots on the trees and branches to look like snow has collected. Little details like this make such a difference!
- Now comes the fun part! Playing with fondant! For the lampost, you’re going to roll your fondant out fairly thin and use a paring knife to handcut all your shapes. Just layer then on top of the cake and on each other. Use a tiny, tiny dab of water to adhere the fondant pieces together if you have to!
- For the wardrobe, I used a solid piece of brown fondant to make the rectangle and then used a paring knife to make the indents for the doors. The doorknobs, top accent piece and bottom piece were all handcut and “glued” together using small amounts of water.
- Once your wardrobe is assembled, spread a thin amount of white buttercream on the back and press it onto the side of the cake to hold it on.