Jewelry box cake for 1st Communion

 

First I want to tell you that I have NEVER EVER had so many problems with a cake! Not with the decoration, idea, but with the most stupid, basic stuff that I couldn't possibly imagine it would ever happen. I baked 3 layers of cake and 2 of them went right in to the garbage, the third one was OK, but I would probably stick to the recipes I have from before. I don't know what was it that day, but it seamed that this cake just didn't wanted to be made :-) Even the simplest thing- the cake platter , I couldn't find the color I wanted, so I covered it with paper and it looked awful. But that is not important now, because it made one girl's face shine, and that is the most important thing ;-)
It was intended for the 1st Communion of the daughter of a very good friend.
The actual event was amazing! She sang so beautifully and was as pretty as a doll!!!

Now about the cake-I have made it in 24 hours, from scratch everything. A huge mistake, because if I had done some of the stuff beforehand I wouldn't have to stay awake for 24 h straight, but it wasn't my fault, we just had too much going on at the time. The layers were lemon cake, the filling raspberry jam and vanilla icing.
It was covered with fondant, but the flowers are from gumpaste ( the first time I ever worked with gumpaste, but not the last). The dove is from royal icing ( amazing recipe, I will post it later I think). I have used a lot of petal dust for the flowers, but I've brushed some on the actual cake as well.
I warn you that on these pictures the cake is not finished yet! My camera died ( again) and I am waiting for the girl's mother to send me the " finished condition" ones. So, I apologize for the

At first I thought that it is a good idea to put a flower on top of lid:



Here are the flowers up close:

I didn't have any veneers to use, but I am planing to buy some, as well as other flower cutters, because I really want to get into the whole gumpaste flowers thing.

It is so much fun and I really like it, but I need more practice, definitely. They are not as near to perfect as I would wish, but they are not bad either.

But then I started to think that it makes the other flowers look " artificial" too much, so I started thinking of something to make it look more like a jewelry box.

So this was the first "look" of the cake.
Then I came up with the idea for a cameo on top of the lid, as well as painting of a floral pattern on the actual box and the lid.
I made the cameo dove with the olive branch from Royal icing ( I apologize for the blurred picture, my camera died right at this moment and wasn't able to produce a clear picture ever since)

The design of the dove was mine, I just came up with it :-) although I would have loved to have pattern, it would have saved me time :-)


So, this happened after that:

But, then my Royal icing got to thin and my writing didn't turn out well, so I waited the sign to dry and I removed it and I wrote it again, but I don't have the picture of it yet.
When I get the new pictures, I will post them as well!

P.S: There it is, the new pictures:
And the this one:
I will never use this type of paper for underneath! I knew it was not intended for this purpose, but unfortunately I didn't have a choice this time. I was pressured by time and I couldn't look for a different one.  http://cakes.anniesartbook.com/search/label/my%20cakes?updated-max=2008-05-26T22%3A02%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20