Baron VonFunburger's Haunted Castle Cavalcade

Ahh. Sascha and I dreamed this whimsical castle cake up one hot Texas summer day when searching our favorite Threadless shirts... little did we know it would end up taking us no less than 16 hours to create it. We ended up baking nine 9x13 cakes to put this thing together (five layers for the castle and six layers for the towers, plus cake for each burger), and the day we baked happened to be one of the hottest days this year. It was toasty in the kitchen, but we had great music, cats who wanted to help and a great guy willing to run get starbucks coffee or sonic ice to keep us going!

Sascha and I (newbies to cake creation-we started a beginner's class a month ago) made it piece by piece over a period of seven days, with help from Zak (he ran to the store for more shortening and powdered sugar a number of times-what a trooper!). We used chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and german chocolate cakes, homemade buttercream icing and homemade chocolate icing (our first time to make this-it was incredibly tasty!), homemade chocolate marshmallow rice treats for the meat patties (had a difficult time keeping this stuff around... munchers kept coming by and stealing pinches off the delicious krispie treat), powdered sugar, fondant, bread crumbs (making an appearance only on the Chickenstein VonNuggets and Filet-le-Fishman patty) and gum paste. We shaped the castle to make it look 'whimsical' for fun (since the shirt is pretty whimsical itself) which ended up making things a wee bit more difficult considering the heat, but it sure looked cute and tasted fantastic!