Hey everyone!
So you may or may not know that I used to make cakes, but they weren't your standard home baking cupcakes and sponges. Think multi-tiered wedding cakes, sculpted cakes, sugar flowers etc.
When working on the cakes, I was never happy. There was always something that wasn't quite right in my eyes. It's only natural that when you keep putting yourself down you start to believe the crap you are telling yourself... so I decided I wasn't good enough and quit... and signed up for a degree in Natural Sciences (Biology/ Genetics) - but that's another story!
Looking back on some of the cakes I made, it makes me realise that some of them weren't too bad, I can still see the flaws, but passable! Not that I would ever think about making them again (too much politics to be registered etc!) but thought I could share a few of them with you guys.
So... here we have R2D2.
This was requested by someone that said to me "Star Wars theme - whatever you can come up with I'm sure it'll be great!"
The finished product
Now to me, it's important that when people ask for a cake, they want cake! It winds me up on these cake TV shows when the majority of the structure is from krispie treats or modelling chocolate or anything that is non edible. Yes there are occasions when these are needed but I think a lot of cakers use this as a get out clause and use it to overkill now.
Building the legs
This guy is full on cake - totally edible, with the ONLY exception being the 'stand' and the LED light used!
The hard thing was to give the illusion that R2D2 is 'standing'. So I stacked some cake drums to the right height to create a 'stand'. This was covered with black sugarpaste, along with the main board to give the illusion of him standing.
LED is working!
Even though there is a whole array of coloured sugarpaste on the market today, using an 'off the shelf' blue that wasn't quite right wasn't going to cut it for me. So I always mixed my own. Even though there isn't a huge amount of blue I think I got about as close to the colour as sugar will allow.
I looked like a Smurf for a week after making this colour!
All the detailing you see is edible (minus the LED remember!) hand crafted with different sugar mediums. As you can imagine it took a fair while to create. Buttons. Panels. Wires. Clips. All of which have to be correct proportion and colour to give the right effect.
Slowly getting towards the finished result
As for the flavour... this cake was my rich double chocolate sponge with milk chocolate buttercream.
Finished 'display'