Week 36 - Princess Castle Cake

This week’s bake was probably the most stressful of the year but by far the most rewarding and it was only a Victoria sponge!!! A few weeks ago a friend of mine Rebecca sent me a link to a charity called Free Cakes for Kids that she thought I might be interested in. Just days after I logged on to look at it another friend Kathryn was round for dinner with her husband and mentioned that she had started to volunteer with the Edinburgh branch of Free Cakes https://www.facebook.com/FreeCakesForKidsEdinburgh?fref=ts! Small world, huh? She put me in touch with the coordinator Lesley so I could find out more. Basically the organisation works in local networks around the UK and the coordinators take referrals from organisations who know of children who, for whatever reason will not be getting a birthday cake this year. Then one of the loyal, dedicated volunteers in the network whips up a tasty cake, usually with a theme relating to the child’s favourite thing (such as One Direction, Smurfs, pirates, princesses and other things that don’t necessarily lend themselves to cake!) and delivers it to the referring organisation for them to pass onto the child. So, this week was my initiation... my task was to make a birthday cake for Phoebe who was turning 6 years old and who would like ‘something Princess themed or anything girly’.

After lots of searching on Pinterest, and creative planning discussions with my husband Dave I finally decided to try to make a Princess Castle. This was followed by a fairly expensive, lengthy trip to Lakeland to get appropriate sized cake tins, fondant icing, edible glitter, a cake board etc. etc. etc. but it was worth it and hopefully I will get the chance to do lots more cakes for Free Cakes Edinburgh so it will all come in handy again. With all the right equipment it was time to start the creation. I have to say I really was quite nervous, as I don’t have any children of my own I’ve never made a kids’ novelty cake before and I don’t have much experience with fondant icing so it was going to be a steep learning curve. I also kept thinking about little Phoebe and what she was going think, it was so much pressure making cakes for other people. I remember my mum making me amazing novelty cakes when I was a child, I was so worried about messing it up and her being traumatised for life by my dodgy turrets or a princess toppling over the wall that was falling down!! But I got a huge list of hints and tips from Kathryn and some help from my good friend Jen so it was time to bite the bullet and get on with it...

Jen gets to work!

I decided to keep the cake itself quite basic because the decorating was going to take a while and I also thought a Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and butter cream was probably a safe choice for a wee girl. So my usual Vicky sponge recipe it would be. I doubled the quantities of everything below (I left them here just in case you want to use the normal recipe) to make enough to fill a 10inch, a 6inch and 4 ice cream cones filled with cake batter.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1997/classic-victoria-sandwich

Ingredients

For the cake

• 200g caster sugar
• 200g softened butter
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 200g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp milk

For the filling

• 100g butter, softened
• 140g icing sugar, sifted
• drop vanilla extract (optional)
• 340g jar good-quality strawberry jam

Method

1. Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Butter two 20cm sandwich tins and line with non-stick baking paper. In a large bowl, beat all the cake ingredients together until you have a smooth, soft batter.
2. Divide the mixture between the tins, smooth the surface with a spatula or the back of a spoon, then bake for about 20 mins until golden and the cake springs back when pressed. Turn onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely.
3. To make the filling, beat the butter until smooth and creamy, then gradually beat in icing sugar. Beat in vanilla extract if you’re using it. Spread the butter cream over the bottom of one of the sponges, top it with jam and sandwich the second sponge on top. Dust with a little icing sugar before serving. Keep in an airtight container and eat within 2 days.

     Decoration

• 1kg white fondant roll icing – rolled out as per the packet instructions to approximately 4-5mm
• 500g pink fondant icing – doors, windows, walls all stuck onto the white fondant using ‘fondant glue’ which is just a block of fondant glue warmed up with a drop of water in the microwave. Thanks for the tip Kat!!
• 1 tub of edible pink glitter
• 1 tub of hundreds and thousands
• 4 flat bottomed ice cream cones and 4 standard ice cream cones
• LOADs of icing sugar
• Apricot jam for sticking the fondant icing to the cake
• Writing icing tubes for the name

In the end I was quite pleased with the result, it took several hours, a few mishaps along the way, total carnage in our kitchen and quite a lot of anxiety but in the end the cake vaguely resembled a princess castle. I also learnt LOADS for next time I do a Free Cakes for Kids cake so fingers crossed I will get a bit quicker.

Kitchen warzone

Kathryn kindly and safely delivered the castle and her amazing Smurf cake to the referring organisation Mentor http://www.mentoruk.org.uk/blog/ and got some lovely feedback to say how excited the children would be to receive them which was nice.

The finished castle

I will never meet Phoebe, or know if she really likes Victoria sponge or edible glitter but that doesn’t matter, it still feels rewarding to have done something as simple as bake for a great cause. I really hope she enjoyed her cake and maybe, just maybe in 20 years’ time she will be making a cake for her kids and remember the slightly dodgy turrets and sparkly castle cake that someone made her once...

Happy baking 

xx Linds xx