Hogwarts!

Well my friends, I pulled it off! The Hogwarts cake which I've been dreaming of making for years now, and which Hillary forced me to make, is finally completed. Although now it's just half of a 10" cake and a box of castle turrets sitting in my kitchen, because that's all that's left after we ate it.

The party that we had on Saturday was a belated celebration of Wizarding Independence Day, normally celebrated on May 2nd (not to be confused with May 4th, which is Star Wars Day). As Hillary tells it,

I just successfully had a party because I wanted a pumpkin pie cake shaped like Hogwarts. And it was doubly awesome, because I got to see all of my friends.

Sounds like a good party to me!

Now, more about the cake, because I'm sure that's why y'all are here in the first place. I made two cakes, a 6" and a 10" out of two batches of Martha Stewart's pumpkin pie cupcakes recipe. If you remember, the last time I made this recipe, I used pumpkin pie filling instead of just plain ol' pumpkin puree, and it turned out to be a success. This time however, Dad bought pumpkin, and guess what? It still tasted really good!

The cake is covered in marshmallow fondant, which is not vegetarian friendly, if you did not know. Also, if you didn't know, working with marshmallow fondant gets easier every time. And I realized that heating it up in the microwave for a few seconds before rolling it out makes it waaaay easier to cover the cake.

I got the cobblestone texture by rolling it out on an impression mat that I bought at Bliss and then painstakingly painted with icing paste color and lemon extract (vodka works too, but I don't know where my parents keep that). Just make sure you don't get it on the floor:

The towers were also covered in fondant and painted, and the door is fondant too. The cake took a whole two days to work on, and only a few minutes to demolish-- I mean eat. :) But it was sooo tasty and definitely worth all the work. The cake didn't exactly survive the trip to Hillary's house, and when I got there, I had to "glue" the top three towers back on with white candy melts. Still worth it!

Long live the Boy Who Lived!