okay, I was asked by a girl (that I do not know real well) to make a castle cake for her dd. I said yes cause I wanted to make one, but I told her that I had never made one before to sell and that i wasn't sure how fabulous it would be. I also told her because of this I would only charge $30. (It was enough cake for 50 people 
) Well, the cake was fun to make, but took a long time, and it turned out GREAT! when she came to get it she loved it and paid me an extra $10 
. While my hubby was carrying it to her car the towers started falling over! 
I put it in my car carried it to the church where the party will be and fixed it up the best I could. I was really able to fix everything, and it still looked good when I left. The party is tommorrow at 2pm. (i will be out of town). The cake is on a cart. She is planning on wheeling the cart outside. I am sooo scared the towers will fall again.
Should I give her the money back?
How should I of attatched the towers? (they were paper towel rolls with bc on them and an ice cream cone on top of that)
this is bothering me so much i cannot even sleep. i am so embarrased and feel so bad. she stood over me the whole time and was like "oh a litle purple here" "look at this part".......
im so sorry tohear about your cake fiasco!! i have to (want to) make one at the end of thisd month for my youngest and would also love to hear any ideas for getting the towers to stand up and stay. i made a halloween cake and used a hollow tube to make the tree i guess i was the same( in general) technique as the towers would be but it also started to fall when the car started to move!! i was planning to stuff the towers with candy, maybe this would help to give it a little weight and add to the"sturdiness"
thanks for the info on your cake!! 
No don't give it back. Business is business and your part was to make the cake and you did. You gave her fair warning in telling her you never done one before and you even gave her a discount on something that was way more than $30 in your time, plus you even fixed it when it came apart! I would put this one down in the books as a toss-up and take it as a learning experience. Maybe next time you could try glueing the towers down with non-toxic hot glue or putting dowels in the middle of them for more support. Don't fret about it anymore. You gave it your best and that's all anyone can do. Smile and breath. 
I've never done this cake ... I'm a novice ... There is a book by Debbi Brown that has a castle cake ... Why don't you drop by the bookstore and check it out ... not necessary buy it but check the instructions ...
No problem. Ihad almost the same thing happen to me when I was making desserts for a coffee shop here in town. The guy was always telling me what I could do to my desserts to make them look better and this and that when he was comparing my homemade stuff to what he orders from a company that has machines make their stuff. He even went as far as to ask me to portion all of my desserts before I dropped them off. I finally just got tired of it and told him I was not going to sell to him anymore. Now he calls every once in a while asking if I'll make them for him again. I politely say no. You can only take so much. The funny thing is even though he had a mix of homemade and bought desserts, my desserts were always the first to go.
Not sure if this will help with paper towel towers, but the ice cream cone towers I did on my castle cake stayed where I wanted them so hopefully this will help ! When I am attaching things other than cake to the boaed I use a little white chocolate melted as the glue, once it dries it is very hard and holds well, I also used white chocolate to glue the two cones together, and then buttercream to attach them to the rest of the castle. I find chocolate a very effective yet edible glue and you don't need that much !!!
When I did my castle cake I "glued" the towers on the bottom layer to the cake board with royal icing. For the towers on the top of the cake - i put wooden dowels through the top layer and put the towers over those (this kept them from falling/sliding off the cake) and then "glued" them to the cake with icing borders. It made it to its destination over half an hour away!
The castle cakes with icecream cones are one of my least favorite to make. When I did mine I used a square cake for the bottom and a smaller round cake on top. I then just placed the icecream cones on each corner and did not use the towel tubes.
I did not really like it...but it did not fall!!!
I think the white chocolate sounds like the perfect glue!!! 
well, the party was on saturday, and I am DYING to know if the cake towers fell again when she wheeled the cake outside. I sent her an e-mail, but have heard nothing. WOuld it be over zealous if I were to call her and ask? (But then if they did fall I would feel like an idiot if she said YES THEY DID FALL, and when they fell it hit a kid on the head which caused that kid to bump into my daughter who fell and knocked out her teeth! HAHA just getting a little carried away! sorry!)
I will see her on wednesday anyway maybe I should just wait till then, what do you think?
I hate when it doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to!!
I made my towers out of cake baked in cans it worked well I put cones on top and doweled them in to the sheet cake they sat on. Towers were not as tall as I would have liked but next time I will find taller cans. Keep the money you earned it I know much work a castle cake is.
I also had a disaster with my towers. I made mine out of modeling paste and the humidity in the air made them colapse. (I have a photo!!) I stayed up till 2am making it then didn't get much sleep because my daughter (then 6months old) decided to keep me up from 3am to 5.30am. when I went to bed at 5.30am the cake was fine...no sign of any problems. I got out of bed at 11am (2 hours before I had to deliver it) walked down stairs and saw a DISASTER! My husband had been walking past the cake all morning and hadn't even noticed!
luckily I work well under pressure! I remade the towers and delivered the cake only 15mins late!!!
[/img]
I just had this exact thing happen to me yesterday 
. All was fine when I left for church and put the cake on the table. When I got home 2hrs later everything was falling. Before we even left to deliver the cake half the towers were leaning and one fell completely off. I was so heartbroken.Evreryone at the party said it was still neat because of the hard work and it was still edible. I still wanted to cry though because it was a surprise for my friends husband. She saw it on Sat just after I had finished it and was impresssed. She even asked me how I could even afford to sell it to her for $22! I told her it was because it was my first castle cake- experimanting and all. I did show everyone the before pix so they could at least see that it looked good at one time. My 12 yr old son though it looked cool because he was telling me before this that the next time I did a castle I should make it look like it was attacked.
Before we even left to deliver the cake half the towers were leaning and one fell completely off.
I was so heartbroken.Evreryone at the party said it was still neat because of the hard work and it was still edible. I still wanted to cry though because it was a surprise for my friends husband. She saw it on Sat just after I had finished it and was impresssed. She even asked me how I could even afford to sell it to her for $22! I told her it was because it was my first castle cake- experimanting and all. I did show everyone the before pix so they could at least see that it looked good at one time.
This has happened to me recently, too! (I emailed the woman pictures of mine...before the tragedy of the towers falling!) This forum makes me feel so much better! I have done 3 castle cakes, and had major problems w/ all of them! I am on the verge of NEVER taking another order for these cakes! I have yet to find a design that I consider to be structurally stable. You all have some great ideas for the towers, may have to give it a try! It just makes me feel so much better to know that others are having the same problems I have with the towers leaning/falling!
I don't know if there are any cakes like this in my future or not, but if so...they will alll come with a caution and no guarantees!
I did a castle cake a couple of months ago (my first one also) and used cupcakes for the pillars and built them around my 10 inch base cake. I shoved a dowel through the cupcakes and the 10 inch so they were connected. I covered my pillars in fondant and PRAYED! It turned out great and didn't fall apart!
Yeah, I have heard of using the dowels pushed thru the towers. I will try to do a castle for my daughter one day, but I am really scared to now. LOL! I guess we have to learn somehow, even if it comes out bad or wrong. It's the thought that counts!
I have done about 5-8 castle cakes. Can't remember exactly. I have done it a few ways. I have only used cake for the terrets once. It was a much larger cake and I used 4" rounds stacked and doweled. Usually, the cake are requested much smaller. SO, I use paper towel rolls and toothpick them to to the cake and ice around with my side icer tip. Much easier. The center is two 10" stacked with a 6" on top of that. I make the dental crowns with fondant a few days earlier. The top are sugar ice cream cones covered in icing and rolled in colored sugar.
Well, a week ago I made my first castle cake, and I also worked har on it. The basis is a square 12"*12" cake. the towers are made of gum paste, rolled on empty paper towel rolls, which I took off after the gum paste dried. I made dents in each corner of the cake, covered it with rolled fondant and then attached the turrets to the dented corners with plenty of royal icing. Luckily, the cake made its way safely to the party.
Quote by @%username% on %date%
%body%