Built with love

Matigan just celebrated her fourth birthday on April 12th. (Pictures of her party to be posted in a separate post). As in years past I got the wise (or maybe not-so-wise) idea to make the birthday cake rather than buy one. Now, I'm not very good at this mind you, I use a box to make the cake and use the web to find videos or pictures to get my "inspiration". But, each year Ryan and I work together to decorate a birthday cake and although during the process we get snippy with each other and sometimes frustrated, in the end we are always so grateful that we took on the task together.

This year Matigan really wanted to have a Princess Party so I decided it would fun to make a Castle Cake. Well, here are the pictures of the process.... not sure fun is the right word to describe it, but it was built with love, a lot of love, and apparently love can be quite the foundation (with significant re-enforcements and lots of adjustments!)

Getting the 'crumb coat' of icing on. In other words getting tons of cake crumbs IN the icing!

OK, maybe the crumb coat helps - here is coat number 2 of the sticky, icing

Now it's starting to loosely resemble a castle....

We decorated the cake the night before the party and then ran into the challenge of storing the cake over night. Luckily Ryan in all his wisdom came up with the perfect solution. So, we carefully placed the Castle in a cooler in the garage with some ice and closed the lid - gave each other a big congratulatory hug and kiss and crossed our fingers that the Castle would be standing in the morning....

Well... it was technically still standing:

YIKES!!! We have a castle that was apparently under siege! Time for some major repairs! We managed to salvage the cake and get it upright once again by using cookies to build up the wall and provide extra support to the foundation.... meanwhile.... party starts in one hour!

Although there was major drama, we surprised Matigan with her special cake and the look on her face made it all worth while!!
Nearly finished

Ta Da! This is as good as it gets folks! Made with lots and lots of love for our very special 4 year old