Louis Birthday Cake: Final Comments

Well, the cake was a success. Potent with vanilla flavor and creamy rich textures. Still, I think I would have done things a little differently. The cake itself was quite rich and too heavy to absorb the vanilla cream. Much of the cream oozed out the sides of the cake. The effect wasn't without it's appeal. Vanilla cream is good no matter where you find it. I think next time I'll use a Genoise cake. I'm also not 100% sure about the boiled frosting on a birthday cake. It did make an interesting "snowscape" for the Star Wars figures, but it also oozed down the sides of the cake. Once again, it wasn't exactly unattractive. I imagine the boiled frosting would have held it's shape better if I'd whipped it longer. Perhaps next time either another layer of vanilla cream (now we're getting into trifle territory) or frost the whole thing with the more traditional buttercream frosting.

Scary Yoda Cake

Baking geeks beware, I too can flood the Internet with images of scary Yoda cakes. As on every May 23rd, we celebrated the birth of my youngest stepson. Bryce is the happy recipient of several Babycakes. Over the years he's seen some of my finest work. Licensed characters are the usual fodder. We've had Bob the Builder (building things out of Little Debbie Cakes and scooping crushed chocolate cookie crumbs), a super-hero camp out (The Flash, Superman, and Batman sitting on Twix logs, toasting mini-marshmallows on toothpicks over a candy-corn fire), SpongeBob Squarepants, Star Wars (Return of the Jedi sandworm scene with the world's ugliest sandworm), and finally Yoda. Ya ya ya ya yoda.

As you can see, I ended up using a hell of a lot of green fondant. The cake itself was peanut butter flavored with chocolate buttercream frosting. I cut a 9 inch round cake to roughly yoda-shaped proportions and used leftover cake bits and fondant balls to build a framework that would form the contours of Yoda's face when draped with a sheet of fondant. I spent about 12 hours trying to figure out how to work with the fondant in sculptural manner. Eventually, I developed a stylized means of depicting the green Jedi master using some handbuilding techniques I'd learned years ago from husband number two, the ceramist.

The birthday boy was pretty pleased. We ate Yoda while listening to the Weird Al "Yoda" (to the tune of the Kinks "Lola"). And fun was had by all.