Castle birthday cake

Thing One wanted to have a Robin Hood-themed friend birthday party. I had decided to make him a castle cake with some Robin Hood figures around it because I thought that was a workable idea, but when I could only find knights-in-armor figures at the craft store, I set about changing his mind and having a knights and dragon party instead. He agreed.

We made dragon invitations out of fancy paper, drew a pin-the-tail on the dragon board and researched castle cakes online. Thing One had some definite ideas of that cake he wanted me to make. Specifically, he wanted me to make this cake:


But this cake would also be acceptable:


Since I didn't even know what materials were used to make the first cake, and the second cake would take me until his next birthday to complete, we discussed finding a backup castle cake design. No problem:


I tried to explain that a dragon cake with a full castle cake sitting in the background would actually be more difficult than making just a castle cake. So he started sketching his vision.


It took an afternoon to bake and four hours to decorate. I dropped it two hours into it, ruining a large corner and rendering part of the salvaged area lopsided, so I had to reconfigure and redecorate part of it hours before the guests arrived. It got the customary underwhelming response from the birthday boy, but it did the job.


Now that his birthday has passed, Thing One has moved on to designing his own Battle on Mustafar "Star Wars" set and describing it in detail in a letter to Santa because even though Hasbro hasn't made it yet, Santa's elves can build anything.


(Letter dictated by Thing One and transcribed by Dapper Dad. Sketches may follow.)