1st Communion Cake with Rosary and Chalice

I really love how this cake turned out!  My husband's coworker's 8 year old daughter wanted me to make her 1st Communion Cake.  A few months prior, I had made her a Minnie Mouse Christmas Birthday Cake and she didn't forget - how sweet is that!

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Being Catholic and loving anything pink and dainty, I came up this cake design.  The cake was a 9” round white almond sour cream cake filled with white chocolate mousse, covered in white chocolate ganache then marshmallow fondant.

The chalice was made out of gumpaste using a little plastic cup as a mold and the stem was built up from 2 separate gumpaste pieces I sculpted freehand. Once it was all dry, I dusted the chalice in Wilton White Pearl Dust to give it some shine.  The Wilton pearl dust is one of my favorite dusts.  It has a nice luster to it and can easily be dry dusted over gumpaste or painted on with vodka.

I also filled the chalice with 3 Communion Bread disks made from gumpaste.

The pink and white blossoms were made with a 5 petal cutter in 3 different sizes. I used a hard candy diamond mold to hold each blossom as they dried…worked perfectly. Once dried, I dusted each with Wilton Pink Pearl Dust and Wilton White Pearl Dust.

My favorite feature of the cake was the Rosary which wrapped around the entire cake. I piped each bead with royal icing then painted them with Wilton White Pearl Dust. I had not done any type of swag design before and worried about the spacing of each section not being even, so I drew up a template to help me get everything perfectly lined up and evenly placed around the cake (I do admittedly confess that I am a bit OCD-ish).

The cake sat over a square baseboard covered in very light, pink fondant and adorned with a pink, satin ribbon. I also added some blossoms to the board to dress it up a bit. I was extremely happy with how beautiful the cake turned out and hope she enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it…I couldn’t help but think back to my 1st Holy Communion and at how special that day was.

The cake was crumb coated in white chocolate ganache the upside down method.  If you would like to read up on how it was done, visit my post, Covering a Cake in Ganache.  Ganache crumb coats have turned out to be my favorite method to torte a cake.  It dries nice and firm, and gives you those beautiful crisp, sharp edges.