How to make a pink princess castle

As I said in an earlier post I recently paid a visit to my family up in Cheshire.  Part of the reason for going up was because it was my niece's fourth birthday.  I originally volunteered myself to make a Batman cake while her older sister wanted to make a princess cake but due to a family emergency my older niece wasn't able to make her sister a cake so I was asked to make the princess castle cake rather than the Batman one.

It was originally suggested that I use shop bought Swiss rolls to make the spires but I was less than happy with that idea.  If I'm making a cake I want to make all of it goram it!  I toyed with making my own Swiss rolls but having never made one before I didn't want to add to the stress of making it by adding an unknown element to the baking.  I instead decided that as well as baking a round cake for the  castle I would bake a sheet cake and cut out rounds from it, stack them together and use them as the spires.  I was very happy with how this worked and it was far less faff that it sounds.

The recipe I used originally appeared in Good Food magazine and is a very nice vanilla cake.  It can be made ahead of time and frozen until needed and will keep well for a week or so.  This makes a lot of cake mix so be sure to use a big enough bowl!

Vanilla cake

375g unsalted butter, softened
375g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla paste
7 large eggs
130g plain flour
150g Greek yogurt
375g self raising flour
5 tbsp milk

Sugar syrup

75g sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
75ml water

Butter cream

250g icing sugar, sieved
80g unsalted butter at room temperature
25ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla paste.

1) Pre-heat the oven to 160C/140C fan/gas mark 3.  Grease and line a 20 cm round tin and a roughly 30cm by 15cm rectangular tin.  I needed to be able to get 12 mini cakes out of the sheet cake so that I could stack them together and make the towers.  I used a 5cm cutter but obviously if you use a smaller cutter then you'll be able to get more mini cakes and so taller, skinnier towers.

2) Cream together the cream and the sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the vanilla paste and eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Once all the eggs are incorporated add the yogurt.

3) In a large bowl mix together the two flours then add them to the wet ingredients, mixing well.  Add the milk.  Pour half the mix into the round tin and the other half into the rectangular.  Put in the oven for an hour.

4) To make the sugar syrup dissolve the sugar in the water in a pan on the hob.  Add the vanilla paste and pour over the cooled cakes.  This will help keep the cake moist.

5) while the cakes are cooling prepare the butter cream.  I find that the easiest thing to do is cream together the icing sugar and butter by hand at first - this should hopefully stop all the icing sugar puffing up out of the bowl and covering you and every surface around as it tends to do if you use a mixer straight away!  Once the butter and icing have been incorporated add the milk and vanilla paste and reach for the hand mixer.  Keep mixing for at lease 5 minutes to give a lovely light and fluffy butter cream.

Decorating the cake

1 ) Once the cakes are cooled it's time to start constructing.  I used a 5cm round cutter to cut circles out of the sheet cake to turn into spires.  I then used the same cutter to cut four chunks out of the round cake for the towers to sit in (this was one of the first mistakes I made - I should have used a slightly larger cutter on the big cake as I forgot that once iced the cakes would be bigger)  Once finished the round cake should look kind of like a Maltese cross.

2) Cut the round cake in half horizontally.  Fill this with butter cream then place the top half back on the cake.  Cover this entirely in a thin layer of butter cream - this is known as a crumb coating and it'll help the fondant stick to the cake.

3) For the towers you'll need some wooden skewers.  My sheet cake gave me 12 little cakes for using as the tower and as I wanted 4 of them each tower would need three cakes.   I measured them, cut a skewer to size and then carefully inserted it into the middle of the tower (make sure you let people know there's a skewer in there or they might get a surprise!)  Cover the towers with butter cream.

4) Now it's time for the fondant.  You can either buy pre-coloured fondant or buy white fondant and colour it yourself with gel colours.  The pre-coloured fondant is slightly more expensive and depending on whether or not you have any local cake shops you might have to order it online.  White fondant is available in any good supermarket and has the advantage that you can dye it whatever colour you want.  Of course you have to make sure you colour enough - getting half way through icing and finding out that you've run out would be a nightmare.  Also the colouring can stain hands and kitchen surfaces.

5) Prepare your fondant.  Fondant can be fairly hard at first, particularly if it's been stored in a cold place but once warmed will become pliable.  I find the easiest way to do this is to play around with it a bit while it's still in the packet.  If you're colouring your own be sure to add a little colour at a time until you reach the desired result and be sure to knead it in well.  I used a 1kg block of fondant with 2/3 going on the round cake and towers (the pink icing) and the rest on the spires (the purple)

6)  Roll out half of the pink fondant on a surface dusted with icing sugar.  It should be about 5 mm thick.  Pick it up carefully and drape it over the round cake.  Using your hands mould it to the cake, making sure that it sticks to the butter cream.

7) Now comes the tricky part.  I admit that I made life hard for myself by not measuring the towers and icing them in a very ad-hoc way which meant that they were far messier than I'd have liked them to be.  So this is the technique I'd use if I were to make them again!  First work out the circumference of your towers -  there are two ways to do this, either using a tape measure to measure around the cutter you used, or the maths way which is 2piR (hmmmmm, pi)  Which translated is (3.14x2)x the radius of the cutter.  This figure gives you the length that you want your fondant to be.  So for my towers this would be (3.14x2)x 25 = 157mm length.  Next measure the height of the tower.  Using these two measurements make a template and use this as a guide for cutting out your fondant.  Place your tower on one end of the fondant and roll it up.  The fondant should stick to the icing and as long as your measurements are right should be a perfect fit.

8) Ok, I lied, that wasn't the really tricky bit.  No, the total pain in the arse was making the spires.  If I'd had more time then I would have made a test cake to see what the finished article would look like and to practise icing the towers and turrets.  Unfortunately due to a combination of it being sprung on me last minute and BabyBear being off school for Easter meant that didn't have time to do this.  We bought ice cream cones to ice but unfortunately they were not straight edged so had to be trimmed to fit.  If I do it again I'd probably make cones out of thin card and mould them round them instead.  I coloured the fondant a light purple and covered the cones with it.  I then left them to dry out slightly over night before putting them on the cake.

9) Add whatever other decorations you want, in this case I used edible glitter, sugar paste flowers, a princess figure my younger sister had bought for it and dinosaur candles (at the moment my niece loves two things, Rapunzel and dinosaurs!)

There are a couple of things I would change about the cake if I had a second chance to make it; instead of making one large tier I'd do two smaller ones and stack them.  I'd also make the spires bigger.  Also when icing the cake I forgot to take into account the fact that the fondant icing would make the cake bigger which lead to a couple of problems - the holes I cut into the cake for the spires weren't big enough and as a result it no longer fit the cake board!  But overall I'm quite proud of the way it turned out and most importantly the birthday princess loved it!