Frozen Ice Palace Cake

  

Elsa's powers are great indeed. How did she build an ice palace in less than 2 minutes, with no engineering help? My cake version took significantly longer and was structurally questionable. But it tasted good and the kids were happy, so it all worked out well!

I started with my previous effort at a cake castle, covering upturned ice cream cones with icing. Elsa’s palace is very tall and rounds towards the top, so I planned a stack of cakes with a small, rounded cake at the very top. This one was baked in a Pyrex mixing bowl. The other three are layers of round cakes.

I’ve learned a new trick which is to make party cakes as a marbled cake. This way, each child thinks their slice is more exciting and they don’t go as crazy clamouring for the icing. I’m going to stick with this plan in future. It is not so much extra work, it just involves mixing up and pouring out the vanilla cake batter, then making up a chocolate batter and adding that to the top of each pan. A tiny stir with a knife is all the marbling it needs.

So I had my stack of three round cakes, pudding cake on top and ice cream cone on top of that. I also iced a “tree” with white icing and put that to one side for later. But it needed a balcony. I didn’t get a special cylinder cake tin, instead I cheated and bought a swiss roll cake and leaned it up against the side. Unfortunately, this cake let me down a bit. It was too light and not dense enough to take the weight of the icing. Despite quite a few skewers driving through the middle, it is still the leaning tower of Piza.

I used up all the white icing in the first layer of icing. (The “crumb coat”, as it is known in the parlance.) So it was going to have to be all turquoise. My royal icing mixture was too runny. I wanted it dribbling down the cake in an iceberg effect, but mine was more like a slow moving river than a glacier. Then the humidity climbed as it started to rain and my icing started to properly pool on the cake board. I spent rather too long scooping it off the board and re-dribbling it down the cake. You can see the mess on the board, and the perfectly visible lines of the cake layers and the patterns on the cones. Much too runny!

It eventually dried over night and the fondant icing and snowflake cutter saved the cake in the end. Despite my loathing of working with fondant, I bought a roll of ready to go white fondant and a snowflake cutter set. Hooray for not having to colour a block of fondant, or having to roll it. The cutters actually worked great. They were well worth the high cost of next day shipping (twice the price of the actual cutters!) Cutting out those hundreds of snowflakes (I didn't have time to count them) didn’t take that long, and I stuck them on the cake on the day of the party. They covered all the icing boo boos and added a great turquoise and white effect to the cake. Plus, I got my balcony properly set out. A round piece of fondant with a snowflake stamped on the surface using the largest cutter painted with food colouring.

Making special occasion cakes is definitely a three day process for me. I make all the cakes a week, or more, ahead, and freeze them, well wrapped. Day 2 is mixing the icing, as the cakes defrost. Then two layers of icing, and cutting out all those decorations. On the day of the party, I stuck the snowflakes on, dusted all with icing sugar and took the cake to the party. I waited till I got there before I attached the top of the balcony and added the white snowballs to the edge.

I don’t mind that my cakes look home made – I hope I am in the vicinity of home made but looking good!