Can anyone help me with making a fairy castle cake?!!

[Moomin]

have saved myself a lot of hassle with dd1's b'day this year by having party at a children's centre where they do all the organising of dancing, games etc, but it wouldn't be the same unless i was running myself ragged and demented trying to get some hairbrain project going at the same time.... so i've decided to make her a cake!!

i'm going to buy the base but i want to decorate it myself with a fairy castle. i'm quite 'arty' and as long as i have a design to work from i'm sure i'll be ok (famous last words). but i need to know :
how far in advance do i have to make it?
if i make the castle bit out of that doughy icing stuff you can model with will it collapse/melt if i make it too far in advance?
does anyone have any links to pics of similar cakes from websites i could look at?
Do you mkake the turrets out of solid icing or do you wrap them round bits of cyclindrical cake too??!
[am i mental even wanting to try this?]

Use upturned ice cream coronets as the towers and square sweeties as the turrets.

this ones nice there really are tons of ways to do it

A friend of mine got a gingerbread house cake form for Christmas and it makes the most beautiful cakes! Would be easy to fairy it up i think, and it would save you the trouble of building the entire thing from scratch.

oooh, just found this for you!

jabberwocky - don't know what you mean? sorry for being thick! your friend got a ginger bread house FORM? like instructions?

It's like a bundt pan but it is shaped like a ginger bread house. The link I just posted is to a castle one.

thanks for both links, jabberwocky and southeastastra. think i will have a go at adapting the one from the familyfun website. (wot are 'jawbreakers'?!! US equivilent of gobstoppers?)

oooooooh, i seeeeee! thanks x

Yes, jawbreakers = gobstoppers

neither one sounds very appetizing, does it?

You need anorak for this one

wot?

Make a round sponge cake. Buy four swiss rolls and place around the sponge cake. Ice cream cones good for roofs. Cover with butter cream icing and use those icing writing tubes to add detail. Or get little biscuits and sweets to make doors, windows, etc.

I made DS a 'spooky castle cake' recently. Square base, covered in roll-out 9in our case a grim unappetising grey colour, but yours will be white, I suppose!) two towers made from a sainsbury's value swiss roll (because they are small) cut in half and iced with roll out icing, then I made a pointy roof for each tower by modelling it from more roll out icing. Ditto battlements, but on a white fairy castle, you could use mini-marshmallows. I cut out arched window and door shapes from more roll-out - you could knead a tiny drop of colouring into it to make pink windows / doors - and I iced on door knobs and 'studs' all the way round the door with the squeeze out writing-icing tubes. I created some green ivy over the corners and up the towers with green squeeze-out.

Then make free with some pastel-coloured sugar crystal sprinkles, and it will look fab.

All these things are available from the Tesco or Saainsbury's cake baking shelves, so the running ragged shouldn't be TOO extreme!

I made some ghosts from mini-marshmallows covered in roll-out, and bats cut out of black roll-out. You could ad some polly-pocket fairies or something.

You can model roll-out just as if it were play-doh and it lasts for a couple of days uncovered. I think it is much easier to manage than buttercream for 'theme' cakes. Horrible to eat, but that's not the whole point, is it?

cor your cake sounds fab blu! love the idea of the ivy - you had some great ideas for other little details too. we've got an icing/cake shop where i live so i might be able to go in there and get a shedload of stuff. from what i remember from last year, our tesco's did the squeezy icing in a tube and not a fat lot else. excellent! thank you soo much