HOGWARTS CASTLE CAKE

My Hogwarts Castle Cake! x



Okay, so a little word about this cake. It is definitely the most involved I have ever been in making a cake before (I think I got through the entire Universal Past Masters collection of the Beatles, yes really). It was, as previously mentioned, for a Harry Potter themed Halloween Party as most of my friends are self confessed Potheads. They asked if it was possible if I could make a 3d cake like Hogwarts, and never one to shy away from a challenge - I rolled up my sleeves.
If you are a bit of a creative, or as others like to call it "a nutter", you have to have big ideas and a lot of perseverance. When I was challenged to this particular cake, I knew it would take around a day and a half in work and a lot of emergency fix ups (for the cake not me).
The first thing I did was watch the first film again and use the zoom button to analyse Hogwarts castle when the kids first arrive. Then I did several sketchups of Hogwarts, downsized them and looked about how to keep the same structure but to be more realistic and take a few bits out. Yes, I am aware that I sound like a nerd.
The cake did taste good, when all was said and done, but I think you probably will have realised that this one was more in the appearance. By the end I was nearly crying when my smallest friend (dressed as Hagrid) was about to cut it, "It's art," I said. "Yes," they said, "but you can also eat it." Which they did rapidly.
I'd say that this was probably the most rewarding cake I have ever made, I say made, but I basically mean built. Where you can see the grassy verge the castle is parked on, I made a square chocolate cake and covered it with buttercream which I had coloured green, like the grass. I then rolled out a lot of roll out icing and spread it across a massive square cake board to represent Hogwarts in the snow. The actual castle I believe comprised two cakes which I hacked up to the shapes I wanted, (the towers were basically big oblong blocks of cake which I covered in rounded icing). To cover the parts of the castle, I heated up apricot jam and spread it on the cake which I then wrapped around with icing, it was a sticky process). I then painted a light layer of black food colouring onto the white icing, because it dries in a grey marbled effect like the walls of a castle. The turrets were Askies icecream cones, along with the windows which I fixed on with icing. I also had to shove a few pokers through the towers into the verge to stop them from falling. Though they were pretty resilient after that, as I had to take it to the party five miles away in a car. I'm not going to pretend that wasn't a stressful episode, we had to drive like pensioners so the car wasn't smeared with the remainders of Hogwarts. The little details were the easiest to make, just with icing and different food colours. The base of the the mountains (to the left) was set with chocolate sauce, I used a different amount of food colouring to make the grass of the Quidditch pitch (next along) - when it came to it, we stuck pokers with hoops at the top into the pitch to represent the goals, the path was chocoballs, the forest (chocolate sauce and hand painted icing trees) and the lake blue icing with boats painted with brown icing. I wanted  it to have the original effect of when all the torches are glowing in the walls when they approach it, so I stuck in a few candles around the walls to achieve it. If you have a project like this, do the research and get the universal past masters of the Beatles, that is all I will advise!

KITCHEN SONG OF THE DAY: PULL SHAPES, THE PIPETTES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYVKFLWyczI