Castle Birthday Cake + Other Party Food!

I have to be careful what I pin on Pinterest these days because Sylvia now knows how to find and scroll through my "kid's stuff" board. She selects whatever takes her fancy and "orders" it (her terminology). Luckily, the castle birthday cake she chose from there for her 5th birthday was within my capabilities!

This cake took a while to make and decorate, but it was not difficult. It was a lot of fun and definitely worth it. Sylvia and I did the cake decoration together. It was simple enough that she could do a lot of it herself and she loved it. Sylvia was very happy with the result. She told me that it looked even better than the picture we copied it from. In my sleep-deprived pre-party delirious state, I almost burst into tears of relief and joy! My only goal was that she love it.

I copied the cake from this picture. I made three square tins of vanilla cake (same cake I made for the Easy Car Cake) and two round chocolate cakes (recipe from the Oh She Glows Cookbook).

For the bottom, I placed two of the square vanilla cakes on top of one another and cut the other square vanilla in half and placed the halves on top of each other to make a rectangle base (I didn't have appropriate rectangular trays, but obviously this would be easier!). Then the two round chocolate cakes went on top sandwiched together. The filling between the vanilla cakes was vanilla pastry cream (same I as I used for my trifle) and the filling for the chocolate cakes was chocolate pastry cream (just 2 tablespoons of cocoa added to a batch of vanilla pastry cream). These fillings were brilliant! All of the cake was then covered with a lot of vanilla buttercream icing with a bit of red colouring in it to make pink.

Pre-decoration - note Sylvia in the background!

For the decoration, we used Oreos, lollypops (instead of the marshmallows in the original photo), ice cream cones, ice cream wafers and lifesavers for the drawbridge put onto skewers.
 

Here is some of the other food we had, all selected by Sylvia!

Sandwich snake

 

Fairy bread spirals

 

Choc chip pikelets with chocolate spread

The fairy bread spirals and sandwich snake are ideas from a Woolworths magazine. We also had jelly shots (I managed to find vegan jelly!) but I forgot to take a photo.

Here is some of the other food geared more towards the adults. Not pictured are the usual and unbeatable sausage rolls, my mum's amazing vine leaves and fruit.


Banana muffins

Spinach dip