Cool Homemade 3D Carousel Cake

This is the Carousel cake I made for my son’s circus themed 3rd birthday. I used a few ideas from cakes on this site and combined them into one cake.

The cakes were box mix white, 2 12in rounds for the base and 2 8in rounds for the top, all cakes were sliced in half and filled with lemon curd (which made them very heavy). To support the weight, I had to use a cake tier set.

The “tent” top was tear-drop shaped sugar cookies that I cut free-hand, but they didn’t fit together exactly after baking.I coated them with royal icing colored yellow, blue, and red and attached them, alternating colors, to the cake overlapping (which gave it some height). This took a lot of tinkering and lots of frosting and I wasn’t overly pleased with the final outcome! (If I do anything like this again I would roll out a single large circle of cookie dough and cut it into 4 triangle shaped sides).

The animals were sugar cookie cut outs decorated with royal icing and buttercreme, and I attached them to old-fashioned candy sticks in the back with buttercreme. The candy sticks were not quite as tall as the columns so I secured them on top with more frosting. I used the Wilton buttercreme recipe for the frosting.

I think overall it came out really good and my son loved it!