"Royal" Birthdays!

Every January, our church family celebrates our Pastor's and his wife's birthdays. Most of the time, we give them a combined birthday party, as we did this year. Our church is honored to have an incredibly talented cake decorator among us. However, due to caring for her husband, she was unable to do the birthday cakes this year. I was asked to do them and I complied (why, oh why? Sucker for punishment I guess.) No, I was honored to help such great people celebrate. This was to be my first major undertaking though since I needed enough cake to feed about 165 people. My math skills acquired at Pitkin High School came in handy. :-)

Since I was making the cakes, another lady in the church, so willingly consented to decorate for me (hey, she volunteered to help so I took her up on it...haha..love you Margie). Anyway, she decided to do a royal theme based upon a fairytale that she wrote just for the Jacksons in honor of their birthdays this year. She did an awesome job writing, illustrating, and putting it all in a handmade book. So...it was about the King's Royal Subjects (on a spiritual note. *smile*).

I settled upon the castle cake concept. After much figuring, I did a sheet cake made up of 2 11x15 cakes, and the rest of the cakes were 10 and 12 inch rounds, and an 8 inch square for the castle. The sheet cake was my book, the rounds were my "hills" and the castle sat on the 12 inch "hill". The sheet cake was chocolate (half was coconut pecan filling and the other half was chocolate buttercream); 10 inch was almond with cream cheese filling; 12 inch was strawberry with cream cheese filling; and 8 inch square was a fudge marble torte with buttercream filling and chocolate ganache.

The book was iced with white buttercream and accented with a red fondant "bookmark". The mountains were draped in green marshmallow fondant (MMF) and the castle was "bricked" in gray MMF walls. The turrets were hand-shaped and added to the top of the castle.

Wish that the idea that I had in my head would have worked but I made do with this and made it work. Looked very nice on the decorated cake table and the colors matched wonderfully.

A lot of work but the King's Royal Subjects, the Jacksons, are worth every bit! We are a blessed people. :-)