Saturday 15 December 2012

Castle Cake Tutorial

My niece turned 5 last weekend, and I was asked to make a castle cake for her princess themes birthday party. I modelled the cake off the classic Women's weekly castle cake:


I wanted to step it up a notch, so I googled for cake ideas. Many were too hard for me, but I took a lot of ideas from a lot of different cakes, and designed my own. I found drawing a sketch helped my planning too.

Fondant

I used pettiance icing, which is the same as fondant. I started by colouring about 1.5kgs of it pink and about 250g green (leaving 250g white). The reason you want to do the whole lot of one colour at the same time is so you don't end up with different shades of that colour throughout the whole cake (you will never match the shade perfectly again.) When you have coloured your fondant (tutorial here if you don't know how to do that) make sure you wrap it well in glad wrap/plastic wrap as it dries very quickly.


Turrets

You can do the turrets a few days in advance, as there is no cake in them, so they won't go off. You will need

- your coloured icing
- 5 toilet rolls
-plastic wrap
-5 small waffle or ice cream cones.
-a knife
-a rolling pin
-icing sugar
-water and a small brush
-tooth picks

Start by covering the toilet rolls in plastic wrap (for hygiene reasons). Then roll out the icing colour on a bench which is well dusted with icing sugar (so it doesn't stick to the bench.) Wrap a toilet roll in the fondant and cut off to shape. Use water on a brush to wet one edge of the fondant, so the other side will stick to it. Use your fingers to shape it. (remember to put un used fondant straight back in the plastic wrap.) Use the back of a knife to lightly draw a brick shape on the fondant before it sets. Repeat this for each toilet roll.

For the cones, use a different colour. As before, roll the fondant out. Brush the cone with water and roll the fondant on and cut it to shape. Use your fingers to stick it to the cone. Repeat for each cone.

Use a little water to stick each cone to a covered toilet roll. I used some white icing in the turret shape (as above) to help stick them together, and to hide the gap. Roll out some white icing, cut into shape, and wrap around the join from the toilet roll and the cone.

If you want flags for the top of each turret, cut these out from the white icing. Stick half a tooth pick as the post in each flag. Leave for 24 hours to set, then place carefully in the top of each cone.

The cake

You will need to bake 2 big square cakes (any flavour). And one loaf tin sized cake. Leave until completely cool.

Level the two big cakes and fill and cover with butter cream frosting. This is your cake base. Now you will need to roll out your big lot of coloured icing. Remember to use a bench with icing sugar on, and turn over the fondant frequently. You will want it to be about 80mm thick. When it's big enough, cover the square cake with it. See a tutorial here for how to cover a square cake with fondant.



Assembly

When the cake is covered, you will want to put the turrets on straight away, so they will harden and stick as the fondant hardens. Put one turret in each corner. You may need to use toothpicks to help them stick.

When the turrents are there, you can see how much room there is for the middle cake. Cut the loaf tin cake to size, and cover with icing, then fondant (as above.) Stick this to the middle of the cake with a little frosting on the bottom. When this cake is in place, place the final turret on top.



Decorations

This is the fun part where you can be creative. Make windows and doors out of fondant. Stick them on using a little water. Make a mini princess, make whatever you feel like. Its the perfect time to use any extra fondant up, and add your own flair. I also added a paper banner with my nieces name on it.











Watch them be amazed, and enjoy






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