A Castle Cake for a Princess Party

Cakey wanted a princess theme for her 5th birthday party. With her agreement we changed it to a castle theme to make it a little more open-ended and boy-friendly. I really had no idea what to do for the cake until my mother pulled out her old copy of the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. Inside was a castle cake that I thought that I could make.

I am not that great in the kitchen. Normally for birthdays, I bake a round cake and decorate it with sweets. This castle cake was going to be my very first fancy cake. I used my usual kid party cake recipe from Donna Hay, this recipe makes a solid cake which is easy to ice and decorate.

Recipe for one basic vanilla cake:
2.5 cups of plain flour, sifted
1.5 teaspoons of baking powder, sifted
1.25 cups of caster sugar (Donna's recipe actually calls for 1.75 cups of sugar but it is way too sweet)
250g butter, melted
4 eggs
1.25 cups of milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat all ingredients until smooth. The mixture is quite runny. Pour the mixture into a lined and greased cake tin. Bake at 160 degrees C (320F) for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. I made two of these cakes in a 22cm square tin. I made each cake from scratch because after many baking failures I have finally learned not to double a recipe.

Bake two square cakes

I made a large quantity of fluffy butter cream icing in a pale pink. (I also had extra icing ingredients in the pantry in case I needed to make more.)

Butter cream icing
250g butter, softened
2 cups of icing sugar mixture, sifted
2 tablespoons of milk
Beat the butter with an electric beater until very pale and creamy. Beat in the icing sugar, milk and food colouring.

Now the construction... I chose the flattest cake for the castle's base. I covered it with a thin layer of icing. I squared off the second cake and cut out four, mostly equal, squares for the castle towers. I placed the cake squares (towers) on each corner, the icing acted like a glue.

Cut out four equal, flat squares for the castle towers

At this point Chris took the kids to the park so they wouldn't hear my swearing as I tried to ice the castle cake. I found the joints between the base and the square towers very difficult to ice. In the end I disguised my messy icing with strategically placed liquorice all-sorts, smarties and freckles.

Ice the cake and use ice cream comes for the turrets

Next the turrets... using tall ice cream cones. I placed the cones on top of the iced cake towers. According to the photo in the Women's Weekly the ice cream cones are completely covered in icing. I could NOT get the icing to cover the cones. In the end I only iced the bases of the cones and left the rest of the cones/turrets plain.

We needed some little flags to finish off the turrets. I cut four flag shapes from a piece of folded over paper. I glued the paper flags onto toothpicks and carefully poked the sharp end of each toothpick into the top of each turret. I added candles and I was done. Yay! For her 6th birthday Cakey will be getting a round cake decorated with sweets.....

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS, google+ or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Getting creative with kids

I often find that I set up art and craft for the kids, get them started and then quietly disappear to do something super-exciting like washing the dishes. I like to draw and paint too... why do they get to have all the fun!!! After all, I desperately want to find the time to draw and create. If I wait until the kids are tucked into bed I am just too tired to do much of anything.

So lately I have been setting up projects that I want to do and amazingly enough the kids love it. This is one of those projects. I felt the need for some simple watercolour painting. Out came the brushes, paint and paper. Out came two small children eager to see what I was doing.

Unlike my children my imagination is old and tired. Visions of unicorns, rainbows and fairies don't come easily to me, I need a little bit of inspiration to get me started. For this project I raided the fruit bowl for some unsuspecting fruit for a still life.

Cakey's banana, capscium and potato

Boo's fruit and veg

Cakey's strawberries and eggplant

The three of us sat very happily painting fruit. It wasn't long before their imaginations let loose, painting fruits and vegetables that we did not have (ie. strawberries and eggplant) and then moving to rainbow rain and beyond. I stuck with the fruit. When they got hungry little bite marks started appearing in the still life!

I have done this many times now and the kids always want to join in. Sometimes they want to do exactly what I am doing and sometimes they use the materials in their own way. So I say 'let those dishes pile up'.

Visit Tinkerlab and the Artful Genius if you would like some motivation to get a little bit creative every day. Visit the House that Lars built and Geninne's Art blog if you would like some inspiration.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS, google+ or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Outdoor play kitchen

Many months ago we found an old cabinet on the side of the road. It was in pretty bad shape – peeling paint, dirty orange contact covering the wooden shelves and a weird asymmetry to the legs. We brought it home, set it up on our patio and pondered what to do with it. I decided to turn it into a play kitchen for Boo. I thought it would be a fun project for us to do together.

The BEFORE picture

Boo and her playgroup friend helped me wash the cabinet. They had great fun dousing it with sudsy water. It did occur to me that I should strip off the old paint and then sand the cabinet but I am way too impatient for that sort of thing. I did however strip off the old orange contact from the shelves.

How did I miss the right leg????

Boo and I took a trip to the hardware store where she chose the paint colour. We also went on a little trip to our local material shop so Boo could pick out some material for the curtain I wanted installed. She chose the first material she saw and would not be swayed.

I painted the cabinet during nap-time. I was super fast, so fast that I missed an entire leg of the cabinet.... which I only noticed when I downloaded these photos. Whoops!

The curtain was attached using plastic tubing and cable pins

Chris made some curtains for the bottom shelf. We attached the curtain by threading a piece of plastic tubing through a sewn loop. The plastic tubing was then nailed into place using cable pins (one on each side and one in the middle). When it was finished the kids and I loaded in all our play kitchen equipment.... and the girls set about preparing a pretend feast.

In the future, I would like to paint one side of the cabinet with blackboard paint so the kids can write/draw up their menu. I would also like to add a rail on the other side to hang tea towels.

There are lots of ways to turn old or unused furniture into pretend play kitchen pieces, here are two of my favourites:

• DIY Modern Play Kitchen from small + friendly, this is an amazing kitchen, way better than our simple cabinet and way better than any of the commercial play kitchens I have seen.
• Play Oven from A Little Learning of Two, another amazing example of upcycling.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS, google+ or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali