Castle Cake 173

by Rochelle
(Tigard, Oregno, USA)

The Castle Cake!

Originally I was going make cupcakes with bows for my daughter's 5th birthday party. When I was searching around for cupcake ideas on the web she saw the castle cake and squeaked with glee that she just loved it and would it not be the best to have it for her party? Being the softie that I am about childhood fun I committed to producing it for her. Little did I know how much work this cake would turn out to be!

So with the cupcakes shunned by the birthday princess I began my quest. I purchased the Wilton romantic castle cake set for making the cake (I used a 40% off coupon at Michael’s so came to about $11). After doing lots of research on others experience with this cake I set out to make it thinking to myself it won't take me that long.

I made butter cake from a mix, a 10" and 7" round both double layered which were stacked with raspberry filling. I used vanilla Italian butter cream to frost the cake. I am so excited because I recently mastered making this butter cream. If you haven't tried it you must. It's the best tasting frosting ever. It's involves making a sugar syrup that is used to cook whipped egg whites.

Then I covered the cakes in white marshmallow fondant. I made more pink fondant flowers than I care to remember, a couple hundred, and probably used about 2/3rd's of them. The flowers were made a few days in advance to dry and the fondant was made a day ahead to rest.

I covered a thick wood board with heavy duty foil for the base. Stacked the cakes after they were covered in fondant using stiff straws. Covered the turrets in purple royal icing and sprinkled with colored sugar and assembled. As I Assembled the cake top to bottom I placed the flowers, piped leaves and borders. A good trick I came up with to make the pillars stay securely in the cake was to drill holes in the bottoms just big enough to hold a wooden skewer tightly. This is much better than trying to "glue" a dowel on flat plastic surface with melted candy to stick into the cake.

A word of caution if you take this on to please your little princess, it took forever to make. I would say I am a well seasoned armature decorator and I think this cake took the longest to make to date (This includes comparison to producing three tiered wedding cakes etc). Definitely give your self plenty of time to complete before your event. But for me it was a labor of love to mark this mile stone in my daughter's life and I am pretty proud of how it turned out.