I have been looking forward to creating this castle cake for my daughter's 5th birthday. There were a lot of children attending as it was a joint party with my friend's son Victor, for whom I had made a dragon cake to complement the castle theme (click this link to see the dragon cake).
My daughter is a big fan of Sofia the First and I made a figure of my daughter wearing Sofia's dress. All three tiers of the castle are made of cake since there were 30+ children and parents. The bottom tier is 8" cake made of chocolate with raspberry buttercream which was made with homemade pureed raspberries. The 6" and 4" cakes are both made of chocolate cake with marshmallow buttercream (homemade marshmallow fluff mixed with buttercream) with mini marshmallows mixed in. Both very yummy and delicious. For variation, the dragon cake was all vanilla- vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream.
I made a lot of the features in advance to make sure they dried- the turrets, princess, flags and toadstools. The princess was the most time consuming part of the cake with tiny details on her dress made with fondant and tiny balls of royal icing.
The balloon is stamped with the number 5 to symbolise Mia's age. The princess' hair was made with little individual layered strips of fondant. The crown was made by hand (as opposed to a mold, which I didn't have!). I used my craft gun to make little strips of fondant which I shaped into a crown and glued together. I could have done with having smaller fingers- the strips were tiny!!! It took a few tries to be able to create the crown. I then painted it with silver edible dust to give it some sparkle! Here is a closer look at the tiny crown:
Here's a photo of the crown just after it was made and before painting with silver edible dust:
Here are some close up photos of other details on the cake:
Here are the cakes all together on the table at the party. The third cake (the one on the far right) is a dummy cake that I had made quite a while ago. My friend's daughter had turned 5 yesterday and was attending the party, and because I didn't have time to make a cake for her, I decided to use a dummy cake and place it on a fondant covered board with her name and age. We all sang happy birthday for all three children, who were all pleased as punch with all the attention and the fantastic cakes!
