Swedish Princess Torte

I'm literally in awe of myself right now after spending almost a full day in the kitchen since 9 am. I've always been curious about this particular type of cake for a long time mainly because of its elegant beauty. And the other day at Ikea, when I saw that they are selling tiny princess cakes in a box in the freezer I almost got one. But really,who wants their first princess cake to be from a furniture store (line stolen from a fellow blogger).


This project gave me a taste of what it's like to work for Ace of Cake... my non-so-secret dream job. I found that it was extremely difficult to work with marzipan. I cheated, and used store-bought marzipan, but even then it was impossible to get my desired color. Since the traditional princess cake is of pastel green, I wanted to make my case at least of a pastel shade. After hours of kneading, I still couldn't turn the marzipan from its original not-so-pastel beige into a more pastel shade of pink. Although I think my camera did me some favors by beautifying the photo slightly.

Generally princess cakes use genoise sponge cakes, but after my experience with genoise last time, I decided to go with my trusted sponge cake recipe from my aunt. I made it into a vanilla flavor of course, but I am entertained by the idea of earl grey princess cake in the future. The rest of the cake, I used Helen's recipe, which can be found here. And unsurprisingly, I significantly decreased the sugar contents. I used a total of 140g of sugar in the cake, 40g less what the original recipe asked for.

The cake turned out lovely. I was also thrilled to make tiny cakes by using the tiny cake pans I picked up from the quasi-dollar store last week. Cake decorating is a mad skill, and the best I could do was putting up a bow for now.

...the raspberry layer

... the custard layer

 marzipan is pretty sweet, so it's a good idea to roll it out thin