Happily Ever After Is So Once Upon A Time.

I know, I know. Looks more like an entry for a Betty Crocker cake contest than Threadcakes. What can I say? I love to make cakes, but haven't had enough practice. One day I'm sure I'll be fabulous. Like in 20 years or so.

My initial idea for this cake was a little different. When I think "once upon a time," castles immediately pop in my head. Originally, I was going to sort of split the cake in half visually with one half being a pristine, beautiful fairy tale castle and the other a neglected, falling apart castle. I figured I could do the falling apart half pretty well. Unfortunately, when I got done done with the pretty part, I had fallen in love and didn't want to ugly it up. I went instead with the sale sign, rather hurriedly done and not well executed. Can you tell I don't plan to win, just wanted an excuse to make a cake?

The cake itself is pretty straight-forward, three 9-inch square chocolate poundcakes. The first two stacked on each other, the third cut in quarters and three pieces stacked (the fourth became my snack). Covered in white buttercream because I decided I didn't feel like playing with food coloring. The towers are just frosted ice cream cones, two cake cones and one sugar cone. They were probably the trickiest part of the whole process. The sugar cones are frosted and rolled in sanding sugar. We have some nice wafer cookies for windows, a chocolate bar for a drawbridge, some chocolate-covered pretzels for the railing. My favorite addition actually was the Fruit Roll-up grass/moat. That turned out far better than I expected and added a ton of color. Everything was edible, and it didn't require any support.

The cake was delicious (even now 5 days after it was made) though I admit we scraped a lot of the frosting off. My daughters even ate some of the sugar cones. In whole, with baking, I probably spent about 9-10 hours of my life on this cake and am actually quite pleased with the results. Thanks so much for being my excuse to make a cake!