Makin' Cake, LIKE A BOSS

As you can see this summer, we haven't been very into making healthy food lately. Any time I'm in the kitchen lately I'm only in the mood for making sweets. And to avoid becoming obese from my new baking addiction, I give all my treats away. It's a good system.

So Lia's 20th birthday was last week, the perfect opportunity to channel my inner cake boss and give away treats. After repeatedly watching cake boss all summer, we wanted to go all out. And since Lia's favourite thing in the entire world is penguins, Amy and I decided to make a penguin cake. Amy came up with the seemingly ridiculous idea of making a stand-up penguin which turned out to actually be feasible! So after extensive research we went and bought a Wilton Cuddly Bear pan from Bulk Barn and we needed to practice a recipe that is "heavier" (long story about making sure the cake doesn't fall over).

To practice our first pudding recipe we decided to also try at the same time making homemade fondant. The result: the R2D2 cake.

We weren't very bright and started making R2 at 10:30 at night so we were up till 2:00am to finish him. The  fondant recipe turned out to be a big success (looked and tasted great) but is VERY time consuming. The recipe we used for the cake is here but we didn't really like it. For some reason we couldn't figure out the cake kind of caved in after cooling.

If anyone is having a Star Wars reunion anytime soon here are short instructions on making an R2D2 cake.
1. Bake 2 8" round cakes. Once cool cut cakes to fit together, cut bottom half into a rectangle, save pieces you cut off for feet (make them the shape we did in the photo). Do a quick layer of icing so the fondant sticks on the cake, you know in Cake Boss when they "dirty ice" the cake.

2. Make your fondant following the link above. The majority should be white, then gray and a bit of blue. Fondant turns out to go really far because you spread it out very thin. Also it can get very sticky so it's easier to cut shapes out if you make the fondant with more icing sugar making it much harder to roll out, but much easier to cut and place.

Trying to unstick the fondant from our hands.

Being very careful placing it on.

It's a very messy process...

3. Sadly we couldn't make R2 an accurate portrayal of the robot in the movie since we were limited by the size of the cake and our late night exhaustion, but if you follow the shapes we made it still looks good. We used a Skittle for the red button and an Oreo for the eye button.

Ok enough about R2. The stand-up penguin was the real challenge. Here's how we made it:
1. After being disappointed with the pudding mix we used a Duncan Hines Golden Cake Mix AND a pound cake recipe making a massive pot of cake that was hilariously hard to mix.

2. Also we put way too much cake in the pan, you should only fill it with 6 cups of cake mix and 2/3 cup in the core this metal thing that goes in the bear to help it bake, which is um.... well, here's a picture and you can just ponder its strange shape yourself.

And here's what happens when you over fill the pan:

3. There is an extensive cooling process, follow the pan directions carefully and you will have an adorable teddy bear which is almost impossible to cut because he is SO CUTE (bear cakes will likely come soon). To make a penguin, cut off the ears to use as flippers and eat the feet.

4. Decorating is fairly simple, you will need special black food dye (can be found at any Bulk Barn) and some orange dye. We used large white chocolate wafers for the eyes, the rest is icing.

And there you have it, the results of Cake Boss marathons on TLC and extraordinary amounts of free time in the summer. Expect a bear cake (or another adorable animal) for your birthday soon.