Gunner's Star Wars Cake

Alright, here's the lowdown on Gunner's cake.  There were definitely some lessons learned on this one, so I'm writing them down.  Hopefully one of these days, I'll be good enough at this whole Caking thing to whip out a nice-looking cake without a lot of time, blood, sweat or tears.

I covered this cake in Ganache this time so that I could leave it out at room temperature and it would keep it's sharp corners.  I'm still learning about how to shape everything.  I used the upside-down frosting technique, which worked great, except for the fact that it came out the shape of a large Rolo.  In the end it didn't matter once I got the decorations on it.

Huge Rolo Cake.  Makes me want it to be filled with caramel.  Yummmm.

I didn't have time to prepare things ahead of time, so it was kind of a last-minute-panic situation.  This led to me working on it for almost two days straight.  Very tiring!  But fun, right?  Hmmmm.

Here's are both cakes finished and on the cake board.  Here are a few things to note:

1.  The Round Cake is a replica of Tatooine.  I used the Wax Paper Transfer technique to wrap the buildings around the cake.  It worked like a dream!  Awesome technique.

2.  The other one is Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder.  I modeled it after a toy, but sort of just made things up as I went along.  That little thing was tons of work.

3.  I loved how the marbling of the brown fondant turned out.  In fact, I thought the two cakes looked so good and clean on the cake board that I almost didn't want to add the extra decorations.

Good thing I did, cuz it totally looks better with everything else.  Don't you think?

Back view.

Here's a close-up of Tatooine.

Gunner helped me make the little rocks.

And a close-up of the Landspeeder.  I used silver luster dust on the gray parts to make them shiny.

Gunner liked that. :)

Here's the new Landspeeder toy we gave Gunner for his birthday that I modeled his cake after.

I got the colors completely wrong, but other than that, I think the cake turned out pretty similar!

The one big thing I want to remember about making this cake is about Quantity, since I'm always trying to figure all of this out every time I make a cake.  How much of 'this and that' does it take to make a three-layer 8-inch round cake (just like the Tatooine cake)?

1.  It took two cake mixes (this recipe), although I used the fourth layer to make the Landspeeder cake.  I would have ended up with an extra layer otherwise.

2.  I made one half batch of chocolate buttercream frosting (I added 1/2 cup cocoa to the butter while creaming to make it chocolate) to fill the cake.  This half-batch would be plenty to fill and frost an 8-inch round cake.  However, if you're covering it in ganache like I did, you could get away with making a 1/4 batch of buttercream for the filling.

3.  Ganache: I used Trader's Joe's Pound Plus chocolate for the ganache.  That stuff is awesome and super affordable.  The recipe for ganache is 1 part heavy cream to 2 parts chocolate. (It's different for white chocolate.  Officially it's 1 part cream to 3 parts white chocolate, although it's tricky to get the consistency right.  You want it to harden into a nice shell, so maybe the proportions should be 5 parts white chocolate to 1 part cream, although I haven't tried that.)

Anyway, the Pound Plus is 17.3 oz.  This makes it 8.65 oz. of heavy cream.

This amount of ganache will just cover an 8-inch cake this size.

That's about it for this one.  Happy Caking!