After much deliberation, she has decided on a Sleeping Beauty theme, which I then broadened to a princess theme, because princess = Cinderella = pumpkins = Halloween. The party will be three weeks before Halloween, so I figured it would be fun to have all the little girls dress up in their princess gear and decorate pumpkins and such.
I also figured--quite incorrectly--that making a castle cake can't be THAT difficult, and so I set out to find inspiration on (where else?) Ye Olde Internets and found these:
Okay. So, I decided to take the shape of the first cake and its ice cream cone towers, and combine it with the marshmallow "stone work" and pretty colors on the second cake, to make The Most Awesome Princess Castle Cake Ever Created By a Mommy. Wisely, I also decided to do a trial run this week, so Keira has been walking around all week saying, "Mommy's going to try to make me a castle cake, but if it doesn't turn out very good, then she's going to buy one." Yep. That was the plan.
Looks like I'm buying one.
My problems with this cake were...you guessed it...three-fold.
1) Despite what I can only call a most generous slathering of Pam all over the bottoms and sides of the cake pans, both cakes stuck to the bottoms of the pans and tore when I tried to dislodge them.
2) The frosting, due to Problem #1 and the colossal failure that was my first attempt at using a cake leveler, did not go on smoothly and, as you can see from the pics, looked absolutely goopy and ridiculous, especially along the sides.
3)
I'll let that photo, and the one featuring a mysterious and chubby little hand wielding a fork at the monstrosity, speak for themselves.
Oh, and Bear would like to add
4) "That color is scary."
My ice cream cone tower didn't turn out half-bad (messy and allegedly-scary frosting notwithstanding), but at this point I didn't see any reason to continue manufacturing more towers, and threw in the towel. All in all, it was definitely a cake wreck--and if you've never been to that site, please spend 10 minutes scrolling through it and giggling yourself into fits of hiccups. I would particularly like to recommend the page on cupcake cakes, and the one on creepy cakes for kids.
Now mine doesn't look quite so bad....okay, yes, it still does.
Ahhhh, the tower was pretty impressive if not for the scary goopy blue frosting. I can sympathize, we made a 3D baseball cake for Silas's first bday and while it looked pretty awesome, it was almost inedible.
ReplyDeletePlus you will be doing all kinds of other stuff for her party and who wants to spend all that time on a cake? I am all for this being one of those problems where the solution is to throw some money at it. You need to find yourself an awesome cake lady! PS the outtake looked very much edible!
ReplyDeleteMy friend went to the internet too to look for castle cakes too and she ended up having to cut the cake into small pieces and put them together to make it stick. I think castle cakes are a lot more difficult than it looks! I think your tower though looks awesome!
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