Baking: My Disney Birthday Party, Part 2: The Cake

As a continuation of this post, I decided to take on the challenge of baking myself a Disney castle cake.   I thought about doing a three tier cake with ice cream cones for turrets, and even after looking around online that still seemed like the best idea.   I decided to rent a set of tins from a local cake shop for the occasion.   No sense in buying tins that big when I wouldn't use them often.   So I bought large amounts of cake ingredients and set about baking three cakes.  

That's where the trouble started.   The baking itself should have been the easy part, but it still went wrong.   I used a simple sponge recipe, and one that I'd used lots before, but for some reason on this scaled up level the big cakes sank.   I have no idea what went wrong!   Maybe you need special recipes for very big cakes?   Something to research and improve anyway.   Luckily though the cakes were solid enough that I could just turn them upside-down and hide the sunken bits.   Next came the piling the cakes on top of each other part.    Easy enough, except that the top two cakes were too wide to leave much space for ice cream cone turrets, so I had to cut them both down to size a bit to make room for them.  Next came the icing.   I'd chosen to do the castle in pale blue, with darker blue turret roofs, and purple decorations.   I decided to use fondant icing, dyed with fondant icing pastes. 

                                        Fondant icing with pastes and edible glitter and stars

                                          The three colours of fondant icing I used.  


Icing the cake went smoothly enough.   The icing for the turret roofs had to be cut into skirt shapes before it could be put onto the ice cream cones, but still, it went well.   I then decided to stack up multiple cones so that the turrets would have walls as well as roofs.   We decided to ice the cones with butter icing, because it would stick well.   So we made and dyed some butter icing.   Annoyingly, because of butter's yellow colour, it's hard to get the exact colour you want, and our butter icing didn't quite match the rest of the cake.  Ah well.   I'm sure no one noticed.

  

So iced turrets were set onto the cake in as castley an arrangement as we could manage.   Next the whole thing was decorated with edible glitter, edible gold stars, flags, doors and drawbridges, windows and purple icing flowers.   Perfect!   Very Disney.   I also bought fountain candles to be like the Disney castle fireworks.   Good effort all round, I feel.