Birthday Cake Ideas: The Princess Castle Cake Birthday Cake

I'm Laurie Gelman for Howdini.com and if you're already excited about this magical castle cake then I hereby declare that you too can make this in your kitchen and we're going to find out how to make this cake for a boy or a girl. To show us how we turn to our friend Leigh Hansen with the Betty Crocker kitchens. Hey Leigh how are you? Hi Laurie. Now that is a very impressive looking cake. Thank you but complicated if you don't know what you're doing. Well if you take it step by step you can do it. I believe you. Step one let's go. Okay well you're going to need four eight inch square cakes and I've chilled these in the freezer for about 30 minutes so that they're not going to have as many crumbs when we cut them. Now to make your tiers of your castle more level I recommend cutting off the domes on your cake. So I'm going to use a serrated knife and go ahead and do that. Then I'm going to use about one third of a cup and scoop it right on top. Then I'm going to spread it evenly. So now that that's done I'm going to take the next cake, invert it and put it right on top and try to center it. And again another third of a cup and we're going to do one more layer. Nice and tall. You can push it down a little bit to try to make it more level. Now this one we're going to cut into quarters. I'm going to put a little dollop of frosting, spread it a little bit and that'll be the glue for starting the next tier of the castle. And just repeat that. We're just going to use one more layer on top. Now we're going to cut this one in quarters again to get about two inch squares. Are we going up even higher? We're going to do a third tier. I'm just going to do two for that. So now we're ready to do a crumb coat. A crumb coat is basically a thin layer of frosting that we spread over the entire cake and that will seal in some of the crumbs so that your final coat is nice and clean. And I actually have one ready to go that we can start doing the final coat on. Great I'll move this you get that. Great thank you. That looks fancy already. Yeah for a little grander presentation we put it on a pedestal. That's great. Now we're going to start the final coat. How pristine do you have to be with this? As close as you can to get a flat finish the better. I just like to get all the icing on first and then I'll try to flatten it out. So now I have this lip of icing and I'm going to start to slice it off running my spatula in. Don't start on your cake you want to start from outside and slice it in. So now for the fun part we get to start decorating. Oh great I mean it looks good enough already but okay let's do it. I have a plate of sanding sugar here this is pink sanding sugar and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these ice cream cones ice them in the pink frosting and you're going to roll it in the sanding sugar to get a nice glistening effect. Sanding sugar you can buy at the grocery store? You can. Okay I'm going to put it here and you can just put your fingers in and roll it around and I'll start the next one. You're going to need five of these. Okay so now we're ready to put them on the castle. Is there a trick? Well basically I would put your fingers in here and then hold at the top and just balance it very gently and just sort of push it in a little bit to the icing to make sure it adheres. Great and one for the top. Beautiful. So now we're going to add some accents some candy. Okay. Well I have some sugar cubes some little stars and some gumballs and some little wafer cookies. So the sugar cubes you can just place them. We're going to put these little stars up here and we'll use our frosting as the glue. Dipped it in a little bit and then maybe some of these gumballs. So now we're going to create the doors and the windows. I'm going to use these little wafer cookies. I'm going to use two for the door and then I've cut some a little shorter to make for the windows. How cute. So I'm going to pipe on some accents and we have it. This looks so gorgeous. Every little girl would love to have this at their party. Thank you. Oh but the final touch. Candles. Candles. Light them up and sing happy birthday. That's so great. This is very girly girl though. Can you do a boy's castle? Sure you can just frost it with chocolate and maybe change the color palette. Use some yellow and blue and red candies and you can change the wafer cookies to chocolate or vanilla. That's a great idea. And put a moat. Definitely dragon. I'm trying to think about a sword. I love it. I love it too. Thank you so so much. I'm Lori Gelman for Howdini.com.