Koraidon Cake

Koraidon is a Pokémon from the new Pokémon Scarlet game. My nephew wanted him in his battle form for his birthday cake.

The cake is chocolate with chocolate ganache. The tire in his chest is chocolate cast in a donut mold, covered with gum paste. The feathers and horns are wafer paper. The eyes are isomalt with wafer paper pupils.

As usual, I made about four times as much cake as the occasion required, so we only got through the head at the party.

Jason Cake

My niece’s 15th birthday cake features Jason, a character from an expansive world of her imagination. Jason is a Voidspawn, so the cake has a black and purple mirror glaze with silver luster dust to suggest the Void.

Jason is made of gum paste, as is the Casting Circle on top and the spectral hands floating around the cake.

Hollow Knight Cake

In keeping with our Hollow Knight Halloween costumes, Sam wanted a Hollow Knight cake for his birthday this year.

For reference, this is the image, from Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition, on which the cake is based

The back is fondant over foam core, painted with food coloring. The rocks on the base are fondant as well, which is good because Sam loves eating fondant and enjoyed eating the rocks as much he enjoyed the actual cake. The cape is wafer paper, coated with gelatin, and the sword is gum paste.

The body, the horns, and the soul totems in the background are made of rice cereal treats covered in fondant.

The soul totems were not in the image the cake is based on, but Sam seemed to think they were important. The one on the left is full of soul energy, hence the little white bits.

The one on the right has been corrupted, hence the Void tendrils. All the Void tendrils are made of gelatin.

The Knight’s head and the thing he’s standing on are made of cake, which is much more cake than we needed for the five people living in this house.

We did Zoom the grandparents in to the party, but unfortunately, they couldn’t help us eat the cake.

Valkyr Pusheen Cake

Another cake celebrating my wonderful niece! It’s Pusheen dressed as Valkyr, one of Alex’s favorite frames from Warframe. For reference, this is what Alex’s Valkyr looks like.

Pusheen is a very simple shape, but Valkyr’s outfit is quite complicated. To figure out what gum paste pieces I needed to make, I began by making a full-scale model of the cake out of newspaper and masking tape.

Using that as a guide, I made paper patterns for all the pieces of her outfit and from those paper pieces I made templates and forms to cut and shape the gum paste. The amazing thing is that I actually managed to carve the cake enough like my model that all thirteen pieces of the crown fit together on the cake more or less the way that they were supposed to.

Inisde, Val-kitty-sheen is a beautiful lemon-flavored rainbow.

Spike Roller Cake

This very pink monster is a mini-boss from Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. It's chocolate cake with milk chocolate ganache icing. The spike roller itself is a tube of dark chocolate with white chocolate chip spikes and milk chocolate mousse inside.

Isaac Caboom Cake

Based on Duke Caboom from Toy Story 4, the figure on top of my Isaac Caboom cake was supposed to do a daredevil jump off the end of the cake. Like many of my cake mechanisms, it sort of worked eventually, but not as well as I had hoped. Which is pretty on brand, both for me and for Duke Caboom.

The cake is lemon cake with raspberry mint white chocolate ganache. The red, yellow, and orange piece on top is isomalt. The guy is made out of gum paste with royal icing detail piped on top.

Ancient Red Dragon Cake

Our love of Dungeons and Dragons continues! For her birthday this year, my niece requested an Ancient Red Dragon, guarding a d20, sitting on rocks that spell out “Roll for initiative.” At this point, I’m becoming something of a dragon specialist (see my Frost Dragon Cake and my Norbert(a) Cake), so this seemed well within my skill set.

The chunks of rock themselves are sea foam candy, carved into the shape of the letters, with strips of red and orange LEDs behind them, hooked up to a basic flicker effects controller.

The sides of the d20 are made of gum paste, precut into triangles and assembled around the cake in the center. It turns out that an icosahedron is a very difficult shape to assemble accurately, so I had to do a little shaving and filling to make everything fit, but I was able to mostly hide the imperfections on the back and underside of the die.

I premade the head out of gum paste, so it would be totally dry when I went to assemble the cake. The wings, the spines on its back, and the little fins around the mouth are made of wafer paper (of course with some wire support inside the wings.)

To make the mouth glow, I ran wires down the underside of the belly to a flame simulation LED under the tongue (which is also made of wafer paper). I really wanted smoke to come out of the mouth, too, so I ran a tube up the underbelly and into the mouth as well and hooked it up to the same dry ice fogger I made for the Frost Dragon Cake. The fog didn’t really come out of the mouth, I think because the tube I used was too narrow, so I unhooked it and just made a dramatic atmospheric cloud of fog around the whole scene.

Frost Dragon Cake

My creative brief for this cake was a frost dragon from Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I was able to discover, there is not actually a canonical frost dragon in D&D, but I found a photo of this figurine and my niece deemed it acceptable so I set about transforming it into cake. 

The interior support structure of the dragon is made of foam core and 1/8” brass rod. The landscape around the dragon is rice krispie treats covered with royal icing, which I applied with an offset spatula then textured with a damp paper towel. The underbelly of the dragon is also made of rice krispie treats, as a result of which I was reminded of a valuable lesson – rice krispie treats don’t stick very well to foam core, at least not well enough to be used upside down, supporting the weight of a layer of fondant. The rice krispie treats began to separate from foam core, resulting in some big cracks on the dragon’s belly. 

Before it got any worse, I added a few more rock formations to support the belly and patched the cracks with royal icing. About 2/3 of the tail is also rice krispie treats and the rest of the tail and body in chocolate cake, covered with fondant. The legs are a 50-50 mix of fondant and gum paste. I did all the scale texture with a highly sophisticated tool that I made by cutting a v-shaped notch into a piece of foam core.

Before I attached the head, a 2-year-old friend who was hanging around our house told me that it looked like a dolphin. She’s not entirely wrong. With the head connected, though, it began to look like a dragon. The head is made of gum paste formed over a mold I made out of foam core. 

The wings are also gum paste, over top of a structure made of wire. The wings were the part I was most nervous about attaching, but they turned out to not be a problem at all. The treasure chest and the coins are also made of gum paste, with royal icing accents on the chest.

Because no dragon is complete without a miasma of ominous fog, I ran a PVC tube under the cake board and up into the treasure chest. I hooked this up to a home-made dry ice fogger, which consisted of a 5-gallon bucket with 3 little fans I had lying around glued into a hole I cut in the side of the bucket and – voila! The fog didn’t last too long, because there was no heating element in the fogger, but it was cool while it lasted.

Guardian Skywatcher Cake

For his 9th birthday, my nephew asked for Guardian Skywatcher from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you aren’t familiar with it, it look something like this:

This was one of those cakes of which I just underestimated the difficulty. In retrospect, the difficulties should have been obvious. The shape of the Guardian Skywatcher is very undercut. It has pieces suspended off the sides by thin supports. The propellers are wide at the tips but narrow in the center. And the entire thing is flying. None of these things are easy to achieve in cake.

Yet I blundered into the project with big ambitions but minimal preparation. Long story short, it was almost, but not quite, a total disaster. Attaching the pieces on the sides was a nightmare. The propellers all broke before the party. Even the pink piping gel I used for the glowing sections faded before the party started. On the bright side, at least the entire structure didn’t collapse, which was a real possibility. Overall, clearly not my strongest work, but my nephew, who is among the sweetest people in the world, loved it anyway.

Miss Fritter Cake

Look – it’s  another Cars-based cake! And one of my best, if I do say so myself. If you’re not an avid follower of the Cars franchise, you might not be familiar with Miss Fritter, so if you need to get up to speed, here’s a video clip.

I’m really happy with how well this one turned out. All the detail is gum paste and royal icing. The hand painting was particularly fun to do.

I also put Lighting McQueen’s number 95 in the middle of the cake because the birthday boy loves numbers.

The nice thing about this cake was that I could just buy the die-cast toy version of Miss Fritter and measure and scale it up. Then I gave the toy to the birthday boy for his present, so it all worked out perfectly.

Here is the cake Miss Fritter next to the toy version I modeled it after and the slightly smaller toy version that the birthday boy already had.

Bluebird Cake

For her granddaughter’s birthday, my friend asked for a cake that somehow combined the themes of bluebirds and the universe.

I came up with this cake that’s sort of a cosmic bluebird in a space nest with planetary eggs in it.

It turned out to be surprisingly elegant, especially when compared to my usual cakes.

The swirl is a gum paste / fondant mix. The planets are isomalt. The bird is gum paste over rice krispie treats. I also put a little blue silhouette of a bird inside the cake.

Mega Rayquaza Cake

My niece wanted a Mega Rayquaza cake. If you’re not familiar with Mega Rayquaza, it looks something like this:

It’s not really the most conducive shape for a cake, but I like a challenge. It’s made by threading little cylinders of cake, reinforced with discs of chocolate, over a bent steel rod. 

The details are all fondant and gum paste, except for the weird trailing tendril things, which are gelatin.

It wound up being extremely bouncy, which made the drive from our house to the park where the party was kind of stressful and it did suffer some slight damage along the way. All in all, not my cleanest work ever, but a pretty cool shape to build out of cake nonetheless.

Norbert(a) Cake

We’re all Harry Potter all the time at our house these days. So for his 8th birthday Sam wanted a cake of Norbert hatching out of an egg on Hagrid’s table. Here is what the scene looked like in the movie.

The thing about baby dragons is that they’re mostly wings. So in order to have enough actual cake in the body to serve the guests, I had to make the cake pretty huge. That base is a 3-foot diameter plywood circle, covered with wood-grained fondant.

The cake is stacked and sculpted onto a foam core base, supported underneath with aluminum straps, then covered with a mix of fondant and modeling chocolate. I started with a light skin-toned base and airbrushed the colors on top. Sam even helped me sculpt some of the details.

The wings began with a wire armature, covered with gum paste. The membrane is made of gelatin. I’m particularly pleased with the airbrushed veins.

My absolute favorite part about the whole cake, though, is the string of drool hanging from her mouth. It’s piping gel with a strand of sheet gelatin in the middle for structure.

To make the egg shell, I draped gum paste over an oversized plastic Easter egg, then Sam helped me to break into pieces and place it around Norbert like he had just hatched out of it.

The dishes are also made of gum paste. I formed them over a lovely set of china that my sister’s mother-in-law gave her. Obviously, it needed the finishing touch of a little piping gel tea residue in the teacup.

The treats on the dishes are rock cakes and treacle fudge that Sam and his mom made from recipes in The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook. We have also made the pumpkin pasties recipe from this book and all the recipes have turned out great. Highly recommended.

Inside, the cake is chocolate with chocolate buttercream icing. Sam helped me make that, too. For once, the amount of cake that I made was appropriate to the size of the party.

After the party, I tweeted photos of the cake to J.K. Rowling and she not only liked it, she retweeted it! As a result, my tweet is currently at over 965,000 impressions and 15,500 likes. Based on the replies, Harry Potter fans are some of the nicest people in the world.

Update: It's now at over 1,000,000 impressions!

Note:

Unfortunately, J.K. Rowling has disappointed me and many other people. By publicly opposing trans rights and misrepresenting trans people, she has fallen far short of the standard of loving acceptance set by the heroic characters in her books. To learn more, I recommend this open letter to J.K. Rowling from Mermaids, a group in the UK that advocates for trans and gender-diverse children. If you want to help, you can donate to Mermaids, Gender Spectrum, and many other groups working to support trans and gender-diverse people.

Cars Pit Crew Cake

My little friend Isaac really likes the pit crews from Cars. Fortunately, if there is one thing I’m good at, it’s making anthropomorphic vehicles out of gum paste. Over the years, I’ve had a lot of experience.

Because I also like to build automata, I decided to make the pit crew dance.

I really wanted to make it voice activated, with a headset like the pit crew boss. I have successfully made a voice activated automaton before, but for some reason I couldn’t get this one to work so I had to settle for a switch. In the end, the switch was probably better because it was easier for Isaac to use than the voice activation would have been and he really enjoyed turning it on and off while carefully examining the mechanism.

The actual cake is the tires behind the pit crew. They’re a basic sponge cake with a raspberry or blackberry jam filling, with modeling chocolate treads, dipped in dark chocolate.

They were kind of like really fancy Donettes. Which is to say they were fabulous. If I do say so myself.

History of Life Wedding Cake

This is the third wedding cake that I have ever made. Which means that, amazingly, there are three couples in the world with that level of trust in me

The bride is in law school and the groom is a paleontologist. The wedding was on September 3, which is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which, as everyone knows, is the treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War and in which Britain recognized the United States as an independent nation. Just kidding, I had no idea what the Treaty of Paris was; I had to google it.

This is the design we came up with.

Each tier represents an era of the evolution of life on Earth – Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. The tiers get progressively shorter as you move up the cake, to suggest the shorter duration of each era. The overall shape is meant to evoke this kind of spiral shape that is often used in images describing the history of life.

Each tier has a “couple” on it, as well as other iconic forms of life from that era. The Paleozoic tier has a couple of trilobites.

The Mesozoic era features a Tyrannosaurus Rex chasing a fleeing pair of pterosaurs. Note the T-Rex's feathers.

And the Cenozoic era tier has a megatherium (which is kind of giant prehistoric ground sloth) and a couple of hyaenodont skeletons (the groom’s PhD dissertation centered on hyaenodonts).

On top of that tier walks a couple of Australopithecus, which I’m told is something that the groom has been imagining on his wedding cake since he was a little boy. It’s inspired by these fossilized footprints that suggest that an Australopithecus couple might have walked next to each other, hand in hand.

The cake is covered with a mix of fondant and modeling chocolate and all of the figures are sculpted out of modeling chocolate colored with powdered food coloring. I made all the large figures in advance, over forms made to mimic the curvature of the cake tiers. That way I could make them well in advance and bring them in my carryon, since I had to fly cross-country for the wedding. (I didn’t fly with the whole cake. I arrived three days early and rented an Air BNB with a full kitchen to do the actual baking and assembly.

For the smaller fossils and bones at the base of each tier, I made molds out of food-safe silicon, so that when I assembled the cake I could just push some fondant into the mold and stick it on the cake.

Of course, Australopithecus would have been nude and the couple understandably didn’t want exposed genitalia on their wedding cake. They also wanted to incorporate the Treaty of Paris, so I was delighted to discover that the Treaty of Paris has a nice blue ribbon at the bottom, running underneath the signatories’ seals. So I made a replica of the Treaty of Paris for the top of the cake with a long ribbon on the bottom to wrap around the couple’s inappropriate bits. Although if you look closely at the above photo before I put the ribbon in place, you’ll see that I couldn’t resist making the Australopithecus couple anatomically correct.

It's made of edible wafer paper with the actual text of the Treaty of Paris hand painted with food coloring. Of course it’s not the entire text, as the treaty is far too long for that. Using images I downloaded of the actual document, I photoshopped the signatures onto the bottom of the first paragraph. Then I printed it out at the actual size I needed for the cake. I turned this into basically edible transfer paper by coating the back of the paper with powdered food coloring. I put this on top of the wafer paper and transferred the text onto the wafer paper by tracing the printed image with a toothpick. Then I went back over the traced text with paste color and a detail brush. To get the graceful curve, I lightly sprayed the back of the wafer paper with water and then set it over and under a couple of rolling pins to dry.

The lowest tier and the dividers between the evolutionary era tiers are encircled with books, which are meant to bring in the bride’s studiousness. They also offered a great opportunity for personalization as the bride and groom sent me a list of all their most influential books. The dividers between the tiers are quite small and made so that they can be popped into place to conceal the cake’s internal support. Those books are just gum paste with the titles painted on.

The books on the bottom tier are much larger and can be seen from the top as well as the sides, so they required more detail to be convincing. So I made pages out of wafer paper and stuck them together with piping gel. Once that was dry, I wrapped each book in a gum paste cover and then painted the title onto the spine. In most cases, I was able to find real cover art from the book to base it on.

Inside, the cake flavors are vanilla, orange, ginger, and chocolate in alternating layers to suggest different strata of dirt. We wanted people to be able to have an archeological experience while eating the cake, so I buried chocolate fossils inside each layer. I made custom molds for the fossils, based on sculptures that I did representing various fossils that would have been common in each of the cake’s eras. With these molds, I cast the fossils in white, milk, and dark chocolate and then embedded them in the cake layers as I was stacking this cake. Then as the guests ate the cake, they got to excavate their chocolate fossils.

The drive from the Air BNB was about half an hour and not over the greatest roads. I enlisted the bride’s brother to help me deliver the cake, since he has an SUV with enough space. He is a former Army Ranger, yet apparently still found the pressure of the drive terrifying. I don’t blame him. I hate driving with cakes. We arrived at the venue without incident, though.

One of the groom’s paleontology friends created a museum card to accompany the cake, explaining all the different fossils, inside and out. He even gave a little introductory speech before they cut the cake. And apparently some of the groom’s paleontology colleagues even said my T-Rex was one of the best reconstructions they have ever seen in any medium. But, really, this photo is the best part.

Terraria Celestial Event Cake

Alex, for her 10th birthday, requested a Terraria celestial event cake, with a four-sided pillar, each side of which corresponds to a phase of the celestial event – Nebula, Stardust, Vortex, and Solar – and includes the appropriate monsters.

Fortunately, after Sam’s last Terraria cake, I am expert at painting pixel-y gum paste Terraria characters. The guy on the side is Alex’s avatar, with a Horseman’s Blade, which she specifically requested.

The tower is cake, mounted on a pipe connected to a bevel gear, so that the cake can be turned with a crank.

I wanted to make the backdrop change color to correspond with the celestial event phase, so I made a light box like the one I made for the Terraria Blood Moon Cake. Inside are strips of LED tape in pink, yellow, blue, and green. When the cake turned, a strip of copper tape on the gear created electrical connections that lit the appropriate color LEDs as each side of the pillar came to the fore. It quite well at home, but the party was outside on a sunny day, so with that much ambient light the color change was virtually imperceptible.

As usual, I made about four times as much cake as the party required.

Terraria Blood Moon Cake

For Sam’s 7th birthday, he wanted a Terraria blood moon cake. Apparently, when there is a blood moon, a lot more zombies come out and there are some kinds of zombies that only appear in the blood moon. So we settled on a design where the moon changed from blue (regular moon) to red (blood moon) and a bunch more zombies rose up out of the ground.

The characters are hand painted gum paste. The blood moon zombies are all mounted on metal tubes that are attached to a little platform. The platform is lifted by fishing line attached to a wooden dowel, so that when the dowel is pulled out, the zombies rise up for the blood moon and when the dowel is pushed in, the zombies sink into the ground for the regular moon.

Sam also wanted his Terraria avatar and the guide NPC, so I included a little house made of gingerbread where they can hide from the zombies and mounted them on a track so they can walk back and forth.

The backdrop and the moon are light boxes with lids of plexiglass covered with fondant. Inside, are rows of red LEDs and rows of blue LEDs. The LEDs are wired through the platform that raises and lowers the zombies, so that the blue LEDs light when the platform is down (regular moon) and the red LEDs light when the platform is up (blood moon).

Inside Out Cake

This Inside Out cake was for my friend Isaac’s ninth birthday, which is why it’s in the shape of the number 9.

The number 9 itself is mostly foam core covered with gum paste, because I needed room to embed LEDs and I didn’t need very much cake because they party was pretty small.

The memories around the edge of the 9 are gelatin bubbles, which are made by dipping partially inflated balloons, coated with shortening, into melted gelatin. They’re surprisingly sturdy once dry and technically edible, though it’s a little like eating plastic.

Each memory bubble contains a picture of the birthday boy, at ages from infancy to now, printed on edible wafer paper and each one has an LED behind it.

The figures are made of modeling chocolate with gum paste hair and clothes. They are made over a wire armature attached to a motor, so that they can spin joyously around.

The actual cake is the memory balls in the middle of the 9, which are cake balls dipped in royal icing and then in colored piping gel. I was trying to make cake that was easy to pick up and eat with no utensils, because the party was outside. But I didn’t leave enough time for the piping gel to dry, so they wound up extremely sticky and messy to eat. Still tasty, though.

Clash of Clans Cake

For her 9th birthday, my niece had very specific requirements – a Level 6 Clan Castle from Clash of Clans with an Archer Queen and Barbarian King as well as archers and barbarians. This is actually a fairly reasonable cake request, especially since Clan Castles are nice and square, and therefore quite conducive to being sculpted in cake. I, of course, decided to make it more difficult for myself by trying to make the archers and barbarians march in and out of the castle.

I think I actually built a pretty cool turntable mechanism out of 5-gallon buckets and rubber bands, but sadly once I got all the weight of the figures on it, it didn’t really turn. Oh well.

I also had more problems than usual with getting the figures put together. Partially this was because I just didn’t have enough time so the gum paste wasn’t totally dry, but I also had problems with royal icing that just didn’t want to dry. I still don’t know exactly what the problem was. I think I must have mixed it wrong somehow because I’ve never had that problem before. I had so much trouble attaching the Barbarian King’s hand that I ultimately had to leave it off and add some red royal icing so it looked like his hand had been chopped off in battle.

By the time we got the cake to the park for the party I was pretty frustrated, but I did eventually get all the figures standing up. I had to prop some of them up with bits of foam core concealed under green royal icing so that they wound up looking like they were knee-deep in unusually large tufts of grass.

The kids loved it, though, which is the important thing. The best part was after the cake was served when a bunch of the kids dismembered and reassembled the figures like a bunch of miniature Doctor Frankensteins.

Enderman Cake

For Sam's 6th birthday, he asked for an Enderman cake (from Minecraft, of course). He specified that it should have a Minecraft backdrop and that it should be holding a cake saying "Happy Blockday Sam."

For some reason, I found it impossible to locate square candles, so I had to make my own by melting down round candles and pouring them into square molds.

The legs and arms are wood, the head, body, cake, and big grass blocks are cake. There are LEDs behind the eyes, which are covered with several layers of wafer paper and then a layer of purple gelatin sheet. Everything is covered with gum paste plaques. To get the crucial minecraft pixel texture, I cut stencils for every color and airbrushed them. The Enderman only took eighteen separate stencils; the cake took eight; the grass blocks took fifteen (five for the tops, ten for the sides).

The backdrop is foamcore covered with gum paste. In Minecraft, Endermen can teleport, so I tried to accomplish that by cutting out Endermen shapes in the foamcore before it was covered in gum paste and putting LEDs inside. That way, when the lights went on and off, Endermen appeared and disappeared. It worked pretty well, except that Endermen are supposed to be black and, of course, these Endermen had to be white, so they were sort of reversed ghostly Endermen. To paint the backdrop, I needed twenty-four additional stencils.

I was up all night decorating, so I was still awake when Sam woke up at 6:30 am and saw the finished cake for the first time. He was super excited and even more so when I showed him how to operate the teleporting Endermen.

The party was at Kidizens, a Lego play place, and we invited Sam's entire kindergarten class, plus several other friends from his old preschool. The party was an absolute madhouse and a huge success.