Fort Castillo de San Marcos Cake?

My 4th grade daughter has a visual project for Social studies for St. Augustine, Florida. She is thinking of a Fort cake as we have seen some fort and castle cakes online..Its due December 18th. Due you think its doable?? They will probably be not consuming that cake at school as per school policies but my daughter is intrigued with the idea of an edible project. Here is a pic of the fort.

 

 

 

 

LINK to Google Images

 

Any tips, ideas, suggestions, should we go for it? Or drop the idea and do something in a different form?

hmm.. anyone??
 

We thought about it somewhat.. using a 10 inch sqaure cake pan and cutting the inside square with a 6 inch square pan.. and then carving the corners out from another square cake and the *dome* on the corner could be done stacking rounds made with 2" cookie cutter.

 

Cake would probably be WASC with no torting/filling. 

 

All will be ganache and then covered in fondant. And then details could be fondant/gumpaste.

 

For the soldiers, we are thinking buying pirate figures.. cannons with praline wafer cookies and mini oreos..

 

Not sure if it will materialize.. I have sent an email to the teacher to first approve of an edible project..

Thanks Jeanne for your thoughts. The more we are thinking about it, the more it seems doable. I have a stone embossing sheet which we could use. I was thinking of cutting panels too. My daughter knows how to use the grass tip so she seems thrilled. Although I told her that we would try to limit bc since it would be out all day at the school and kids may poke fingers.. wheat thins sounds like a plan. I would love to know more about the piping gel *water*.. Although I am pretty sure I have read about it on cc sometime ago.
Thanks for the inspiration and encouragement.. as soon as I get a *yes* from her teacher, I will be here with more questions along the way
If I happen to get a no for any reason.. then I will fall back on modelling clay and cardboard I guess..

Yes!! Got the approval from her teacher. She is excited to see what we come up with. On a side note, since the project maybe on display at school for a couple of days too and will take a few days for us to put together, my husband suggested to do a dummy cake instead of a real cake. I think that would be great. Suggestions..should I use styrofoam?

I think we will go with the cake as the teachers are looking forward to the *cake* now.

 

Making a sketch and plan and all.. will post updates soon. Thanks!!!

Me and my daughter finally finished making a sketch of the fort on paper. We made it 12cm X12cm (about 9 1/2 inches). I have no clue why we didn't do them in inches.. it seems like too much work now to convert them.. It just seemed to take quite long to figure out the right measurements to make it look right dimensionally.. The inner cutout would be 6 1/2 cms.

 

Attaching a pic to give you a visual

.

 

Now we are thinking of double the dimensions so it would be 24 cms each side. Baking two 10 inch square cakes to give it the 4inch height and then carving the square first and then attaching the rhombus shapes to the sides.. Would that cake be too huge to handle, provided it would have the moat and the boundry and the ocean on one side on the cake board? We will actually start working on the baking portion on Monday and the fondant/gumpaste works.. but want to finish all the planning before that. Does it sound okay so far? Are we on the right track?

 

Here is a fort pic for reference..

 

 

Shout out our planning errors..

As for the dressing up of the fort, we will be using MMF. Green for the grass and texturing with tweezers, also green for palm trees using pretzel rods for trunks. Brown and gray fondant with tylose powder mixed together to cover the fort walls. Will be making panels and using the texture sheet for bricks and smudging some for giving it an aged look. For the towers on each corner, we are thinking of using a round cookie cutter and stacking up cake circles and then covering with fondant again.  Black (satin ice) fondant+tylose for the cannons all around. Piping gel and blue color for water.

Draw bridge is something that I haven't been able to think it out yet. Any suggestions would be helpful.

For the boundry near the ocean.. we are thinking of granola bars or wafer cookies or something in those lines..

Need suggestion for the moat boundry too..

 

Also, to attach the towers on the corners, would we need to dowel it?

 Sounds awesome Jeanne.. Lemme me do some thinking on the drawbridge.. the grass tweezer thingy.. i guess we will skip that and just use plain green fondant...

For sand, we were thinking crushed graham crackers but the brown sugar/coffee sounds very innovative.. I will let my daughter pick what she would like..

 

Thanks once again!!