Clash of Clans Cake

For her 9th birthday, my niece had very specific requirements – a Level 6 Clan Castle from Clash of Clans with an Archer Queen and Barbarian King as well as archers and barbarians. This is actually a fairly reasonable cake request, especially since Clan Castles are nice and square, and therefore quite conducive to being sculpted in cake. I, of course, decided to make it more difficult for myself by trying to make the archers and barbarians march in and out of the castle.

I think I actually built a pretty cool turntable mechanism out of 5-gallon buckets and rubber bands, but sadly once I got all the weight of the figures on it, it didn’t really turn. Oh well.

I also had more problems than usual with getting the figures put together. Partially this was because I just didn’t have enough time so the gum paste wasn’t totally dry, but I also had problems with royal icing that just didn’t want to dry. I still don’t know exactly what the problem was. I think I must have mixed it wrong somehow because I’ve never had that problem before. I had so much trouble attaching the Barbarian King’s hand that I ultimately had to leave it off and add some red royal icing so it looked like his hand had been chopped off in battle.

By the time we got the cake to the park for the party I was pretty frustrated, but I did eventually get all the figures standing up. I had to prop some of them up with bits of foam core concealed under green royal icing so that they wound up looking like they were knee-deep in unusually large tufts of grass.

The kids loved it, though, which is the important thing. The best part was after the cake was served when a bunch of the kids dismembered and reassembled the figures like a bunch of miniature Doctor Frankensteins.