Princess castle cake

My neighbour mentioned yesterday that she wants to make a princess castle cake for her daughter's birthday and I immediately lent her my cake bible (Debbie Brown 50 Easy Party Cakes) with the most gorgeous and simple castle cake in it.

I made this for Sophie's third birthday. Where Sophie's second birthday Miffy cake was a starting point for my home made/decorated cakes, this cake paved the way for the more polished and detailed cakes that I strive to make today. 

The bonus on this cake is that you use ready made swiss rolls, which can be bought from any supermarket, so the focus is totally on the decoration. This was the first time I covered the cake board and I wrapped the fondant over the edge of the board (rather than edge with ribbon, which I now think 

gives a neater finish - and is actually much easier!) 

The castle consists of three large swiss rolls and five mini jam rolls. Two of the mini rolls get a third taken off the top and that extra third gets added to two of the other rolls - this gives a range of heights for the mini towers adding extra interest to the cake. Each of the rolls (large and small) were then covered in buttercream and wrapped in white fondant. The join doesn't need to be perfect as you can arrange the towers with the seams hidden in the middle. A circle of fondant was then cut and placed on top of the rolls and the edges lightly smoothed. I cut a strip of fondant to wrap round the top of each of the larger towers and used a fork to make the indentations. 

Then the fun began ... each mini tower was topped with a pyramid of mini marshmallows in lovely pastel colours (bought from Lakeland). These were "glued" together with edible glue (CMC powder mixed with water). The white fondant was dusted with pink lustre dust to add a blush of colour and silver balls were glued around the cake like arrow slits. I used a slightly darker yellow fondant for the front door and some triangular windows. I also found a bag of fun marshmallows at our local corner shop and used these as extra decoration. Fantastically, the "stripy" shaped marshmallow made wonderful flowers when cut into slices. Silver balls were also pooled around the bottom of the castle.

Even four years on, I still love this cake, with its lovely colours and simple design.

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

Barbie princess cake

A friend of mine just asked for some tips on how to make a Barbie princess cake so I thought I would copy my reply to her here for anyone else who might be interested. I made this for my daughter's 4th birthday last year.

There are several ways that you can make the doll cake:

1. You can buy doll's head and torso from most cake decorating shops (made by Wilton) but personally I don't think they look that nice.

2. You can use a Barbie doll and either bake a lot of cakes to stack to the height of the doll, or you can take the legs off the Barbie (most seem to come off quite easily) so that you don't need to make it so high.


I found the following video clip really useful http://www.howdini.com/howdini-video-7075975.html.


I opted for the full height Barbie and made a selection of cakes - 3 medium width ones, 3 small width ones and one shallow one baked in a pyrex bowl to give the curve at the top. Another suggestion for the curve at the top is to use a doughnut or a bagel. I stacked them on top of each other and carved the outside of the stack to give a smooth slope. I think it looks like a dalek at this stage! I then cut a hole out of the middle of each one and re-stacked them with buttercream in between to hold them together. A trick I learnt on my cake decorating course, which would have been helpful, is to align cocktail sticks in each layer before separating for the buttercream. It is then easy to re-align the cakes in the position they were cut.

I used fondant to cover the cake (over buttercream) and had a front panel and then a skirt draped around the back and onto the front panel. That was tricky as it needed a huge amount of fondant to cover the sides and back - much more than you think. It would be significantly easier to cover the whole cake in coloured buttercream (see the video attached) but I just like using fondant.

I also made the bodice in fondant which was a bit fiddly and in hindsight I could have dressed the doll in normal Barbie clothes and then just covered the join with a ribbon (as I did) or fondant flowers etc.

A useful tip is to wrap the Barbie's legs in clingfilm before you put them into the cake so that they don't get covered in buttercream in the middle of the cake. Also my holes in the middle of the cakes were a little too big so I dropped a few cake off-cuts into the hole and pushed the Barbie into these to keep her steady.

© 2011 Nicola Noble