Hogwarts Cake

It has taken me awhile to get around to this post, but I figured I should finally do it before it's too late. A couple weeks ago, I made one of my best friends a Harry Potter themed cake. This is something I've thought about doing for years but was always too intimidated to try, as there are so many options and most of it would require intricate detail. Well, since this year has been so Harry Potter centric for the two of us (which I will not go into detail about for all of your sakes), I decided it was time to finally tackle it. And it would be the first time I celebrated this friend's birthday in several years, so I figured this cake had to be special. I looked up ideas for Harry Potter themed cakes and tried to take from several of them, focusing mostly on the idea of recreating Hogwarts Castle. The examples I looked at all seemed complicated and time-consuming, so I opted to only make one tower and two small buildings just so it looked recognizable enough. 

These were made with gingerbread and decorated with royal icing that I dyed with food coloring. I made these a couple days before assembling the rest of the cake. Oh, the tower was made by rolling gingerbread dough around a cardboard cylinder covered in foil, and then I slid the cardboard out before baking it standing up just like that.

Next I made marshmallow fondant and rolled out a Hogwarts crest, which I also decorated with royal icing. I then used more fondant to make a small Hedwig owl, a snitch that I planned to attach by wire (so it looked as though it was flying), and a broom. So far the pieces seemed to be coming together pretty nicely. This was also done a couple days before the rest of the cake.










Last but not least was the actual cake. I wanted it to be lemon flavored (since one of the people who would be eating it was allergic to both chocolate and vanilla), so I followed a basic white cake recipe and substituted lemon extract for the vanilla. I then separated the batter into eight different bowls (luckily my parents have a large assortment of mixing bowls to spare in their kitchen) and dyed each one a different Harry Potter House color. Red and gold for Gryffindor, blue and bronze for Ravenclaw, green and silver for Slytherin, and yellow and black for Hufflepuff. The plan was to create a 4-layer checkboard cake with each layer representing a different House.

These were then baked off and stacked on top of each other with black buttercream frosting in between and on top, to create a sort of dark starry night look.

After it was cut into

And lastly, I assembled the pieces onto the cake in the most logical way I could think of, especially since there was not much room for it all. The cake managed to stay standing during the transport and while Hedwig did fall off once, she was easy to reattach once the destination was reached. The snitch also stayed in place pretty well, much to my surprise.

 

While there were many things I would fix next time, all in all I am quite pleased with how it turned out. And I think my friend was too. :)