About Lori Sweere: A philanthropist and business professional, Lori Sweere currently serves as the executive vice president of human capital at United HealthGroup in Minnesota. In her leisure time, she enjoys baking, including decorating cakes for her grandchildren.

1. Lori Sweere - How to Make a
Castle Birthday Cake
By Lori Sweere

2. Introduction
 About Lori Sweere: A philanthropist
and business professional, Lori
Sweere currently serves as the
executive vice president of human
capital at United HealthGroup in
Minnesota. In her leisure time, she
enjoys baking, including decorating
cakes for her grandchildren.

3. Castle Cake How to
 Boys and girls alike love castles, and a castle
cake represents a fun and easy birthday idea.
Many designs of varying complexity exist for
creating a castle cake, with the choice
dependent partly upon personal preference
and partly upon the amount of available time.
A basic castle cake calls for two cakes of
different sizes, the smaller stacked atop the
larger, and ice cream cones of varying types
for towers. One can then decorate the castle
with rainbow colors, sprinkles, and candies,
or attempt a more realistic approach with
stone-colored icing and flowering vines.

4. Conclusion
 For more realistic towers and a more
complicated design, one can use a
combination of paper tubes and ice
cream cones to create towers of
various heights with conical roofs.
Covering the towers with fondant
rolled on a brick pattern can provide a
pleasing stone appearance. As a
finishing touch, one can surround the
cake with an icing moat on the cake
plate and include figures of knights or
princesses.