Making a Gluten-Free Castle Cake with Kids

 

The following is a tutorial of how my husband (who I’ve never known to bake in our 10 years of being together) and my kids (Ellie, 3 & Ronin, 6) made a gluten-free castle cake for my birthday. Admittedly this is a rudimentary castle that could certainly be improved upon with more tries. John thought it was terrible. But you know, I think its perfect. Definitely made with love. And just look at that happy face! 🙂

By the way, please enjoy his Movember handlebar stash! 😉

Step #1:

Go to YouTube and check out Rosanna Pansino & Nerdy Nummies. Seriously, Ro is amazing. My daughter watches her baking videos for fun ALL.THE.TIME. Anyway, she has an awesome castle cake video that gave Ellie some ideas for my cake. But we don’t know how to use fondant, so its on to other options.

Step #2:

John wanted the entire cake to be edible. We’ve seen lots of cake videos where the towers where made with paper towel rolls or plastic, but that was a no go. So they picked up the following items (while I got to sleep in I might add.)

INGREDIENTS & SUPPLIES:

• Eggs
• 2 Betty Crocker Yellow Gluten-Free Cake Mix (Its also available in Devil’s Food Chocolate if you prefer.)
• White & Chocolate Icing
• Vanilla
• Butter
• Cooking Spray
• Milk Chocolate
• White Chocolate
• 2 sizes of square cake pans (9 x 9 and 6 x 6)
• Cakepan for tiny round mini cakes (found at Michael’s)
• 2 cookie sheets
• Wax Paper
• Edible Crown Decoration (found at Michael’s)
• Toothpicks
• Chopsticks

Step 3:

Bake the cake & melt the chocolate. They followed the directions on the Betty Crocker cake mix (2 boxes) to make one large and one small square cake, and a pan of small round mini cakes.

 

• Pre-Heat oven to 350 for shiny metal pans (which we had). Grease bottom of pans.
• Beat cake mix, 2/3 cup of water, 1/2 cup butter, 2 tsps of gluten-free vanilla and 3 eggs until smooth.
• Pour into pans.
• Bake for 33 to 40 minutes, shorter for the mini cakes (about 10 minutes).
• At the same time, put wax paper onto 2 cookie sheets. Place milk chocolate chips on one and white chocolate on the other and melt for several minutes in the oven until they are smooth layers.
• Let all cool. The chocolate will harden.

 Step #4: 

Build the Castle.

• Cut small square cake horizontally in half.
• Ice the top with chocolate frosting. Put in fresh fruit if you’d like in the filling. They did fresh strawberries.

Be sure to get the kids involved in the action. Ellie was in heaven!

• Place the other square piece of cake on top, insert chopsticks (temporarily) to keep it in place while frosting.

• To create the towers, John took the small round mini cakes, and cut just a small layer of the top off to make them flat, and then placed them on top of each other, frosting each in between as the kind of “glue.” You may need to use toothpicks to hold together but they didn’t need to.

• Use the remaining cake to cut into a square small second tier, insert chopstick and ice as the previous tier.

• Cut the white chocolate into small half inch squares. Cut the milk chocolate into four squares ( for windows), a door shape and 6 triangles for the top of the two towers.

• “Glue” these onto the cake with icing as you see in the final pic. Then decorate with crowns for added interest. (Ellie also wanted to put on sprinkles.)

Step #4:

• With the remaining cake, we made cake pops (I helped out with these.) John crumbled the cake in a bowl and layered it in these plastic treat pop displays (purchased at Michael’s). By the way, the small round mini cakes mentioned above also fit into these if you want to layer them with filling for frosting in between for another treat.
• Insert the crumbled cake in layers with frosting and even fresh fruit.
• Top with frosting and sprinkles as shown.

 

Step #5:

ENJOY! And get a major sugar high!