Mega Zygarde Cake

My nephew’s birthday cake request this year was the Pokemon Mega Zygarde. It’s a little glowing guy with a big rocket.

The little guy is made of wafer paper around a metal armature with LED tape. The cape, head, and arms are gum paste. The cake itself if a marble cake with dark chocolate ganache.

Empress of Light

My niece went as the Empress of Light from Terraria for Halloween this year. We had to simplify the costume a bit because I didn’t have as much time to work on it as I would have liked, so it’s all store-bought clothes except for the crown and the wings. The wings are an aluminum frame lined with color-changing LEDs with nylons stretched over them.

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.

Dawnbreaker

For Christmas, my niece requested Dawnbreaker, which is a sword from Skyrim. For reference, here is what it looks like in the game.

It’s made primarily of poplar, with sculpted details using a 2-part epoxy clay and leather grip. The magical glowing crystal in the middle is made of a clear plastic ring box, sprayed on the inside with a frost spray paint with a ball of LED fairy lights inside. The orcs in our neighborhood don’t stand a chance.

D20 Pumpkin

We're all about Dungeons and Dragons around here these days and I didn't have much time for pumpkin carving this year, so here's my quick D20 pumpkin.

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.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Thunderspears

My niece and nephew are obsessed with Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so for Christmas I made the real-life versions of one of their favorite weapons from the game – the Thunderspear.

The blade is painted poplar with inset EL wire embedded in resin so that it can light up like the spear in the game. The shaft is a Martha Stewart curtain rod. Please enjoy their dramatic poses.

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).

Pac-Man Halloween Costume

I’m not sure why Alex wanted to be Pac-Man for Halloween. She may have played Pac-Man once or twice, but she hasn’t seen Pixels. The overall structure of the costume was her idea. It’s made of foam core and it has a removable compartment in the mouth so that she can collect candy in Pac-Man’s mouth. It’s also outlined in EL wire, for easy visibility trick-or-treating at night.

Dark Washbuckler Halloween Costume

Sam is very into Skylanders games and he wanted to be Dark Washbuckler for Halloween, who is a kind of octopus pirate.

I started the costume with black sweatpants and a black shirt and trimmed them with silver. The six extra legs are sewn to an elastic waistband. The hat, belt buckle, mustache, and suckers on the tentacles are made of fun foam. The ladder logos on the hat and belt buckle are because Washbuckler is a climbing type. Sam insisted that there be two on the belt buckle. I’m not sure why. They have LEDs inside to help with trick-or-treating visibility.

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.

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.

Halloween Wars Season 4

I’m back on Halloween Wars!

Minecraft Halloween costumes

My niece and nephew are very into Minecraft, so of course they wanted to go as Minecraft characters for Halloween. Alex chose to go as a wither and Sam chose to go as a mutant enderman. I spent the better part of week staying up late to build their costumes out of foam core, duct tape, and LEDs. It was totally worth it.

Sam at his kindergarten Halloween party. He ran around showing everyone with great delight how he had four arms.

Alex ready to go trick-or-treating. She got tons on compliments on his costume and the lights made her very easy to spot.

In my totally unbiased opinion, Alex, Sam, and our friend Isaac (who was dressed as My Hero Zero, lavishly adorned with EL wire) had the best costumes we saw all day.

Dem Bones Cake

My niece and nephew’s preschool has the delightful tradition of having the pre-K kids perform a little skit based on one of their favorite books as part of the end-of-the-year graduation ceremony.  Three years ago, Alex’s class performed Dr. Suess’s The Sneetches, so I made her a Sneetch cake.  This year, Sam’s class chose Dem Bones as their book so, of course, I made him a Dem Bones cake.

Ever since I saw this video, I’ve been wanting to try to make a zoetrope cake, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.  Unfortunately, I don’t actually know anything about constructing a zoetrope, so it didn’t totally work.  Next time I’ll have to do my research a little better.

In order to make the sixteen skeletons around the sides of the cake, I sculpted one skeleton and then made a mold using food-safe silicon.

I could then make the skeletons by pushing pieces of white fondant into the mold and sticking them onto the cake.  The skeletons are holding letters that morph from the letter “S” to the letter “A” to the letter “M” to spell “Sam.”

The turntable I built for the cake worked perfectly, but I never got it synchronized with the strobe light or viewing slit well enough for the zoetrope illusion to really work.  It sort of works if I animate all these photos together like this, though.

Ultimately, it didn't matter whether or not the zoetrope effect worked, since Sam absolutely loved the cake.

He especially loved the skeleton heads and by the end of the party he had eaten the heads off of all the remaining skeletons on the cake.

Emperor Palpatine Whoopie Cushion Cake

My niece and nephew and I play a game called “Emperor Palpatine Whoopie Cushion.”  I don’t remember the genesis of the game.  Essentially, the kids put imaginary whoopee cushions on a chair and then I, as Emperor Palpatine, sit on the chair, make a farting noise, and chase them around the room shouting about how I’m going to destroy them.

So, for his fifth birthday, Sam requested an Emperor Palpatine whoopie cushion cake.  Here is what I came up with.  The steps, the chair, and the lower portion of Palpatine’s body are cake.  The upper half of Palpatine is rice krispie treats.  I used a little recording module from Radio Shack to record the sound, triggered by a button under the seat that was depressed when Palpatine sat down.

This may be the silliest cake I’ve ever made (which is a pretty high bar), but it was also perhaps the most entertaining.

Star Wars cake

For her seventh birthday, Alex had very specific cake specifications.  She wanted a cake being cut in half by a light saber with “Jedi trainers” around the sides. The only Jedi trainers she could specifically name were Yoda and Obi-Wan, which isn’t surprising, because she’s only seen Episodes IV, V, and VI. So I found a picture of the Jedi Council and went with that.

The light saber is a combination of poured sugar and pressed sugar with a string of LEDs embedded in it. The handle of the light saber is gum paste.  The Jedi trainers are also gum paste, hand painted with food coloring. I’m particularly pleased with the candle light sabers.

Halloween Wars!

Check it out - I'm a warrior of Halloween Wars!  You can watch my TV debut on Food Network, October 7th at 9:00 Eastern and Pacific.

UPDATE: Here are the pieces we made.

Carousel Cake

My grandmother lives near a beautiful old carousel from the 1920s.  When we visited her when were little, she would always take us to ride it.  When I was designing her 90th birthday cake, I got to thinking about riding the carousel with her, and this is the result.

Obviously, it rotated and lit up.  The little gum paste horses on the candles are modeled after horses on the real carousel.