I went way out of my comfort zone making this cake for my sister's 17th birthday party. She had a luau/pool party but originally requested a ice cream sandwich cake, which I didn't think was feasible so I persuaded her that she actually wanted a sand castle cake.

I started out a few days ahead of time by baking two 9x13 vanilla cakes to serve as the base (and the vast majority of the cake), which I cooled, leveled and froze until I was ready to build the cake. The morning of the party, I baked another vanilla cake in a castle cake mold. While it cooled, I mixed up my go-to butter cream frosting with pure vanilla flavoring. (I normally use clear flavoring, but since the frosting was going to be covered in graham cracker crumbs, it didn't matter that the flavoring was brown. And if I had been smarter, I would have tinted the frosting tan so white spots didn't show through the graham cracker crust.)

I layered the two frozen cakes and covered it with frosting. The I leveled the castle layer and positioned it on top of the cake.

At this point I wasn't sure how I was going to get the graham cracker crumbs to stick to the sides of the cake so I took a break to mold some fondant shells.

I took a handful of white fondant, worked in rose tint until the fondant was almost uniform. Then I worked in some copper and ivory tint just a tiny bit so that there were streaks. I pressed a bit into a shell mold, trimming the excess, and the brushed each with pink, white, or gold edible pearl dust and set aside to firm up.

Then I mixed graham cracker crumbs (I bought a box of crumbs so there would be one less thing for me to do), quite a bit of cinnamon, even more white sugar, some dark brown sugar (all three to taste), and edible gold glitter (to give the "sand" dimension).

Then I iced the sides of the castle with butter cream frosting thinned with milk and sprinkled the graham cracker mixture on all of the horizontal surfaces. I mixed in a cup of melted butter with the remaining graham cracker mixture and pressed it on the sides of the castle and the cake. It worked okay, but the entire effect would have been better if I tinted the frosting.

Finally, I positioned the shells on and around the cake. These were helpful in hiding the "baldest" spots.

And I got to tell you - I'm not shy about it - this was the best tasting cake I've ever had.