a spooky castle cake for Ben's 10th birthday

Here's the castle cake we made for Ben's 10th birthday.


It's supposed to be dark purply-blue with yellow windows, but ours is teal blue with white windows. Oh well, you can't have everything! Still, it looked pretty spooky. Here's how we did it.

We sticky-taped glad bake into a cone-shaped piping bag, filled it with melted chocolate, and made chocolate spiders.


Lizzy's looked good, but mine looked more like defective scorpions!


We piped white chocolate into shapes we'd drawn on glad bake for the castle windows (7 2x3 cm and 5 3x5.5 cm windows).


The windows were supposed to be yellow, but we discovered too late that you can't colour white chocolate with water-based food colouring (duh!), you need oil-based or powdered food-colouring.


We baked three round gluten free cakes


cut one of them into a smaller circle, cut a small jam roll in half, and arranged them like this with a wooden bamboo stick holding them all together.


We made lots of teal-coloured butter icing (to stop the icing curdling, leave the milk out of the recipe, add the food-colouring, and only then add any milk needed to get the desired consistency). If we'd had powdered or oil-based colouring, I suspect it would have been easier to get a vivid, deep purply blue, but we had to make do with teal.


Of course, the best bit about making icing is licking the beaters.


Here's the cake, iced and decorated with chocolate shapes, mint sticks, Toblerone triangles, cotton-wool spider webs and a cardboard cone (sorry, I seem to have lost some photos of the decorating process, but it wasn't too tricky).


The cake looked pretty spectacular with candles in the dark.


Smoking, and spookier than ever!



This cake was adapted from Australian Women's Weekly Kid's Birthday Cakes.