The castle cake just before it was besieged. See the knights in the background.
I was just talking to fellow parenting author Jessica Joelle Alexander about the virtues of cake. She's the author of the new book The Danish Way of Parenting, and describes how Danish teachers focus on empathy lessons every week from preschool through age 16, and do it with cake.
Cake seems like a good way to restart the Starlighting Mama blog for the season. The blog and I take summers off from each other. In summer, the outdoors is calling, the children are calling, and computers are cool, but not all the time. So here we are back again, and I can't resist sharing with you my newest cake creation, created for my son's birthday: A Besieged Castle.
Not just any castle, as you can see. It had to be actively under siege. So besides the vanilla wafer crenellations on the battlements, we have knights and siege engines attacking the castle walls.
The siege begins!
The central castle is made from two 8" square cakes stacked on top of each other. I baked a second set of square cakes and cut them into quarters and something less than quarters to make foundations for the towers (toothpicks help keep the towers stable). Then there's stacked blond Oreos for the top of the towers, crowned by Nilla wafers. I've used fruit roll-ups before for windows and doors, but since this was a working fortress castle, we used pretzels for arrow slit windows (also called "loopholes") and the castle door.
To accompany this cake, the kids devised various rough-and-tumble games, including making their own cardboard shields and then staging sword fighting duels and having an archery contest. After all that, they were ready to attack the cake castle.
Welcome back to the blog. If you like podcasts, I also started a podcast six months ago called Renegade Rules. You can listen via iTunes or Stitcher weekly on Saturdays. The podcast interview with Jessica and ideas from "The Danish Way" will be up in October.
Meanwhile - celebrate life with cake.
Flaming torches crown it all. Of course, the good guys win.
Loved the cake. I would have killed for that as an 8-yr-old. 🙂