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??
 

This is a very ambitious project.  Might I suggest that you ask your daughter to design a cake, creating images on paper but not actually baking a real cake?  Have her do some homework on what kinds of pans etc to imitate the actual structures--so that she does the work.,  Baking a cake would be more of a parental project.

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..

I think this is very do-able.  May I suggest rolling out the fondant and putting it on as panels (great exercise in measurements).  The panels can be scored or embossed which your daughter can do with a ruler.  I say go for it.  She can certainly spread green icing for the grass and use wheat thins for the walkways. You can show her how to make blue piping gel for water and use gum paste to make trees.  I love this idea.  Please let me know if she decides to do it - I always encouraged by kids (they are grown now) to reach high and outside the box along with good planning. This idea is  Tres Cool :)

Jeanne

A

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..

You're so welcome.  I miss all the frenzy around projects (my baby is 25 - lol).  I'll be here :)

I think you can just use paste color mixed in gel.  You can get a good size container of Wilton piping gel at Michael's.

AYes!! 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?

Styrofoam would definitely work.  You can hot glue pieces together and to your board and use piping gel to adhere the fondant.  If you want to stay on the edible side, I would suggest using a pound cake.  Dense and easy to cut/carve.  They last a long time.  Still wouldn't eat though - lol

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

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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?

You are doing great!  Give yourself a good pat on the back :)

10" cake - Not too big to handle - remember, you're carving it up into walls.  When the project is complete, you will most likely need help from your husband :)

The draw bridge could easily made of gum paste.  Run a couple of wires through it so you can stick it into the cake - also, if you need to have a bend in it, you want to get that done so it has time to dry.

I think I will give the "tweezer idea some thought - you might regret starting anything with a tweezer - your daughter could easily become bored with that task.  It might  be just the ticket though.

Love the granola bars for the ocean side walls. Moat side - there are curved edges so once again I say fondant or gum paste.  You need a medium that allows you to manipulate it as well as smooth it.

  Let me know If I didn't cover your concerns -     So excited for you and your daughter

Jeanne

If you need sand, you can use light brown sugar and toss a tiny bit of coffee into it for a nice look.

Also, what kind/size board should I use for the project? 

Thanks everyone!! Especially Jeanne!!

My daughter pulled it off.. it was submitted today.. turned out pretty good..

AThat looks so cool! Great job :)

AThank You and all the CC friends for helping out with the planning and execution suggestions and help...

I sent you a message but Great Job!  Congratulations to your daughter and I know you are proud Mom.  So glad you went forward with this.  A+ in my book :)