Fit For a Princess

This princess castle cake made a little girl very happy and I'm rather pleased with it myself, seeing as it was my first attempt at doing a castle cake. 

The stone pattern has been done by hand, and yes that means every single line and corner has been embossed in separately, I must be mad.  It wasn't as bad as it sounds, I strangely like doing jobs like this, I get a system going and can work through it quite quickly.  I start off with the horizontal lines using a wheel tool, do the vertical lines with a blade tool marking out the bricks, then round off all the corners using a dresden tool, I do all the top left corners first, then the top right...you see where I'm going with this.  There is a reason for this method, and it's not OCD if that's what you're thinking!  By doing all the same corners at once you don't need to keep turning the tool which means you can whizz through it quickly, especially if you have the cake on a turntable.

The turrets on this cake aren't actually edible, as they are cardboard tubes covered in fondant, with ice cream cones covered in fondant for the tops.  We used this method so that we got the best finish as we didn't want the turrets being all wonkey or topple over.  The addition of fondant round the cardboard makes them surprisingly sturdy and they're 'glued' into place using royal icing.

The cake has been sprayed with pearlised lustre spray to give it a shimmery sparkly look and there're tiny flowers and vines piped all around the bottom tier of the cake.  And there you have it, a cake fit for a princess.