Halloween Wizard hat home cake

Michael and I wrote a poem for Aurora, over at Writer’s Treasure Chest’s, Halloween poem competition. You can find out about the competition here: https://aurorajalexander.wordpress.com/2017/10/10/3rd-halloween-poem-contest-start/

For purposes of the poem, Michael and I decided to make a new and interesting cake in the shape of a Wizard’s hat home. We had a lot of fun deciding on the form the cake should take. Michael wasn’t feeling very well this weekend so he didn’t help that much with the baking and decorating but he wanted the hat to be blue with yellow stars and have a Smarties door.

I baked three vanilla cakes as follows: a medium round cake, a small round cake and a small bowl shaped cake. Once the cakes had cooled down I stacked them and carved them.

If you look carefully at this downwards shot, you can see the join in the cakes at the bottom and the top. I joined the three cakes together using vanilla butter icing. You will also see the value lines where I carved the cake to get the tall, wizard hat shape. I used a bread knife to do this. I covered the entire cake with a thin layer of vanilla butter icing.

I then coloured a large chunk of fondant bright blue. I rolled out one third of the fondant to about o.5 mm thick and used a large dinner plate to cut out the brim of the hat. I used royal icing to attach the brim to the cake board. I smeared the centre of the brim with royal icing.

I then rolled out the remaining fondant and draped it carefully over the cake. I used a sharp pair of scissors to cut away the excess fondant from the sides of the cake. I then joined the fondant and smoothed it using my fingers. Using a full size cake lifter I gently lifted the entire cake onto the brim. I coloured more fondant a bright yellow and cut out a thick band to go around the hat. I cut stars in a number of sizes out of the yellow fondant and used sugar glue to attach them all over the hat.

I used royal icing to attach the Smarties to the hat to form a door and the windows.

The stepping stones are made of small tennis biscuits and I used chocolate sprinkles for the gravel and desiccated coconut coloured green for the grass. I attached these to the cake board using royal icing.

The final cake looked like this:

Robbie and Michael Cheadle are the co-authors of the Sir Chocolate Book series and Robbie Cheadle is the author of Silly Willy goes to Cape Town

Purchase the Sir Chocolate books and Silly Willy Goes to Cape Town from:

https://www.amazon.com/author/robbiecheadle

OR

http://tinyurl.com/zdokqjr (currently available at a discounted price)

Follow Robbie Cheadle at:

Blog: robbiesinspiration.wordpress.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15584446.Robbie_Cheadle

Facebook: @SirChocolateBooks

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Twitter: @bakeandwrite