Saturday, September 17, 2016

R2D2 Cake

Widget and Sprog were invited to the Star Wars party of a friend. Last year I made this friend his cake, a minion cake. This year I was making the cake again. He chose a Star Wars theme, and after tossing a few ideas around, he settled on R2D2. I have been wanting to try R2D2 or a Death Star for a while, so I was very happy with his choice. For those a bit fuzzy on their Star Wars characters, this is R2D2:




The first step was figuring out the scale. I used a mostly round metal bowl for the rounded top, which had a diameter of 6" at the mouth, so 6" was the logical size for the rest of the cake. I used packet mix cakes, 4 of them, to make my life easier, when I was both working full time and making an Ewok costume in the same week. I baked the cakes over two nights and cut the tops of the three rounds, and trimmed the "head" to be a bit rounder.
The four pieces were crumb coated using white chocolate ganache, then stacked together and secured with three skewers before going in the fridge overnight.  I stacked them on a slight angle, the way R2D2 is when rolling along. I used the natural skew-wiffness of my leveling to create this angle.  The next night I smoothed out the ganache and wrapped on white fondant for the "body". 


 I coloured some more fondant grey and cut out a circle using a pot lid that I smoothed on the top. Then the fun began. I coloured some blue, cut out a circle, then another circle from inside that. The smaller circle went on top of his head, the outer circle I cut into about 8 pieces and spread 6 of them around the centre circle. Using leftover grey fondant I made  the sticky out bits that go on his head, and used a short piece of skewer to secure it in the appropriate places. The eye was a rolled ball of chocolate fondant cut in half with another piece of skewer to secure it. I cut out a bunch of blue and grey pieces and matched them to the model R2D2 from the toy box. The red light is just a teeny piece of red fondant. 

For legs I made a slice in double quantities and left it in the fridge overnight to go solid. Using masking tape I made a pattern of the height and angle of the legs and feet. I put this pattern on the slice and cut them out. 


 
I crumb coated these, with butter icing this time, and left them in the fridge overnight, before covering them with white fondant in the morning. 

The last step was assembly which I did at the venue. I took along some white buttercream to use as glue (pure buttercream goes whiter with just a smidge of black gel colouring). The body of R2D2 was all sitting on the top of a cake base which a balanced on top of a small squat jar, using icing to prevent it sliding around. Then I propped the legs in place, leaning backwards, and used a blob of buttercream on each side to keep them there. 

 










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