How to Make the Castle Cake

Here are the details of making and decoarating the Castle Cake I made a couple of weeks ago for my nephew. It could easily be made into a Princess Castle for a little girl if you use pink and purple and other little girl colors. I colored the icing for my boy version with royal blue and a little black to get a gray kind of color. I used bright yellow, red, and green for the accent colors.

You'll need:
1 deep 9 inch sqare cake pan
2 6 inch round cake pans
4 cake mixes of your flavor choices
six drinking staws
sugar cones (for tower spires)
gumdrops (for ramparts)
small stick pretzels (for drawbridge)
a wafer cookie (for castle door)
candy trees (to decorate the outside)
any other candy that you might want to use to decorate the castle
a toy, if desired, that can be used in the setting, such as a plastic dragon or toy unicorn
decorating tips: a writing tip, a star tip, and a grass tip
other decorating supplies: icing spatula, piping bags, etc.

It is best to plan two days to make this cake. One full day for the baking, cooling and construction of the cake, and the next day have a few hours available for the finishing touches and piping decorations.

Make two square cakes, each consisting of a whole cake mix. Make two round cakes, made of a little less than half a cake mix each. With the leftover mix from the round cakes, bake five cupcakes.

When the cakes have cooled, layer the two square cakes on a large base. Layer the two round cakes on a six inch cake round. Place the drinking straws in a circle in the square cakes to support the round cakes. Trim the straws to be flush with the top of the square cakes. Center the round cakes on the square bottom and place on top of the straws.

Cover the entire cake with the frosting in the color you desire. Smooth this layer and try to keep it fairly neat. Right after this, while the frosting is still moist, place gumdrops around the top edge of the round cake and the edges of the square layer. Trim the five cupcakes to be flat on top, and put them, trimmed side down, in the icing at the four corners of the square cake and one in the center of the round cake. Stick the wafer cookie into the center front of the square layer to serve as the castle door.

Put the cake aside overnight for the icing to develp a crust and the candies to stick. It is always much easier to pipe onto icing that has dried overnight. You can then cover five sugar cones with chocolate or Wilton candy melts, if you'd like them to be smooth and colored, or you can leave them plain.

In the morning, pipe vines around the walls of the castle, using the star tip to add small flowers. Also pipe details, such as windows and molding as desired. Pipe around the door to make a frame, and lay down pretzels to make the drawbridge. Using the star tip, pipe a thick line of frosting around the open edge of each sugar cone, then "glue" each one to a cupcake. Pipe windows and decorations on the cones, making a border where it meets the cupcake.

To finish the cake, add candy trees or other decorations, then pipe a line of "grass" with green icing and the grass tip all along the bottom to finish the bottom edge of the cake. Add grass on the base where ever it is needed. Add the toy as a finishing touch. If it is a dragon, place it as though it is menacing the castle.

You can also make flags for the tips of the towers, using toothpicks and constuction paper if you'd like to. The possibilites for decorating are as endless as making a ginerbread house. You could do an authentic medieval castle, a princess castle, a castle from a particular story. If you wanted a seasonal cake instead of a birthday cake, you could do a haunted castle, or a castle in the winter, decorated for Christmas, or a springtime May Day castle, decked out in flowers.