Happy Birthday Andrew!
Yesterday was Andrew’s birthday. We spent a quiet evening celebrating his 35th year, with dinner and cake.
Inspired by Chocstress over at Chocablog, I decided to make a Dalek Cake.
That’s Andrew with the final product.
I told my coworkers yesterday that this would either turn out really cool or that it would be one big mess. Little did I know that both would be the case. Details on the making of the cake below the fold.
Armed with pictures of a Dalek and the picture from Chocablog, I knew exactly what I was going to do to make this cake. I started with three layers (actually, 2 normal layers and 2 small layers, which was about the equivalent of three total layers.
I put my cookies on top of these layers, so that I could judge how to angle the cuts to make the “skirt” of the Dalek. Then, I made my cuts. This is when the trouble began.
I had cut the “back” with less of an angle than the front, since the Daleks are built that way. Unfortunately, this caused the back of the cake a bit unstable. It started leaning precariously, so I decided to put in some supports. The best thing I could think of on short notice was kebob skewers, but I knew that one wouldn’t hold the cake, so I grabbed a stack.
Yeah.
That didn’t work for very long. Instead, the top layer started to crack around the skewer stack. As I was icing the cake, the top layer actually came off, or at least a large chunk. I didn’t get a picture, because I was too busy trying to salvage what I could. And, frankly, I had a large mess of cake and chocolate icing. Plus, was becoming clear that I couldn’t salvage my original vision.
I was frustrated. I was ready to give up. I even checked the cupboard for another cake mix and frosting (which we actually had), because there was no way I was going wish Andrew a happy birthday with that hideous mess of a cake. But since I’d given up on the cake, I just started playing with it, massaging it into a mound.
The mound ended up having the approximate shape that I wanted for the skirt of the Dalek, so I decided to try to frost it. I didn’t have much frosting left (despite starting with *two* tubs), so I was very careful. Since the mound was very “crumby”, the frosting really wanted to just roll off the cake, pulling lots of crumbs with it. I wound up dipping the knife in water after each pass over the frosting, and the frosting stayed on.
Miraculously, the end product was pretty much what I wanted for the Dalek “skirt”. After that, it was just a matter of piling up some chocolate chip cookies (Keebler, with fudge stripes!), icing those a bit, to get the middle-section of the Dalek, and then topping the whole thing with a Mallomar (which was not as big as the chocolate chip cookies, sadly).
I used Butterfinger Stix as the Dalek’s arms (attached with half a kebob skewer), and malted milk balls made up the “sense globes”.
