How to make a cake

My sister and I made a cake. This was no ordinary cake, we made it for my good friends, Andy and Mary for the occasion of their wedding blessing service. My sister is the one with the cake decorating experience, she's been making cakes and decorating them in outlandish ways for family and friends for a good few years. I've made the odd cake but bar a bit of roll-out icing I've not done much in the way of making them look pretty. Paula came over for a couple of days and together we made a fairytale castle out of fruit cake, marzipan and a lot of sugar paste.

I made the cakes using a Delia recipe. I've made it a couple of times before for Christmas and it's always turned out well. The only difference was that I made three times the amount usually called for and distributed it between two round and one square cake tin. I made a big mess of the kitchen trying to mix that amount of fruit and cake mix in one go. I made the cakes a couple of weeks in advance, that helps with the flavour - as does feeding the cakes with brandy in the intervening time.

We weren't trying anything as ambitious as designing our own cake. We got step-by-step instructions from a book (although we didn't strictly adhere to them and changed a few things - like the colours!). We started by making a hill of cake out of the two circular cakes I'd made, then we added lumps cut from the square cake round the edges and constructed two cake ramps at the front to give the hill some shape.



We then had to go out to the shops to get some marzipan as both of us thought the other had got it. Once we had the marzipan, we rolled it out and covered the cake with it. We also covered a cube of cake that would be the castle to sit on top of the hill.


At this point the cake looks like a giant sneeze - not very pretty. We left it in this state overnight and prepared all the colours of icing we would need ready for the next day.


The next morning and we were ready to roll - literally. we rolled out some of the pale grey icing we'd previously coloured and completely covered the hill with it, smoothing it round and getting rid of any creases. It was starting to look a bit prettier but still not very hilly. We cut squares of caramel coloured icing for the castle walls and roof and then placed the castle on the hill. At this point we realised that perhaps the castle was a little too big for the hill we'd created.


Once we'd created some towers, a door and windows it started to look a lot better.


What really made the difference was adding greenery. I squashed lumps of green into any available space and Paula made them look like grass and shrubs by the magic of the star-shaped end of a piping tool.


Adding the greenery allowed us to hide the bottoms of the towers which were suspended in mid-air! We put in some secret tunnels, stairways and loose rocks on the hillside.


From her magic kit-bag, Paula produced some special cake dust - green and cream powder which you can paint on. We used this all over the hills to blend in the areas of greenery. We also constructed a profusion of turrets for the top of the castle.


We were nearly there - and a good job too. This had taken nearly all day, fueled by a cup of tea every half and hour and it was beginning to get dark. All we had left to do was the fun bit - making teeny tiny flowers with a special plunger and dusting the hillside with sparkle powder and the turrets with gold.


Here's the finished cake!