R2-D2

The day after Emma's birthday Sarah and I had a project on our hands... making a cake for our friend Owen's birthday.  He was turning 7 and was having a Star Wars party and he really wanted an R2-D2 cake.  Sarah and I wanted to help out Mary, Owen's mom, and this was a fun way for us to do it.

We started out by baking 3 cakes and then cutting them into the shapes we needed.  Brad helped Sarah determine the size of the pieces.  At one point they were even doing math to get it figured out just right!  Ashley came over to help show us how to level cakes because we'd never done it before.  It was truly a family project!

Owen prefers yellow cake, so we mostly stuck with that, but did put in a little chocolate cake for the legs.

Then we frosted it all in a white buttercream.  I used the buttercream recipe from Our Best Bites and it is deeee-licious!  I tested it out the day before on Emma's cake.  Buttercream frosting isn't exactly white, but Sarah and I discovered the existance of white food coloring and it totally worked! 

The important part... the details!  We used a silver food spray paint for the R2's head.  Sugar paper, which is much thinner and easier to work with than fondant (for us anyway), is what we used for all of the blue details.  The black is piped gel icing.  A few of the silver details are sugar paper that we "spray painted".  Chloe helped us out with the 3-dimensional eye.  I told her to go find something, anything!, that would work and she came back less than a minute later with the cap from one of our Easy Cheese bottles (Santa puts that in our stockings every year).  She really is a recycling genious.  We covered it in aluminum foil and it was perfect!  The green and red details are fondant.  Flat circles are about all I can handle when it comes to fondant!  The cake turned out awesome, if I do say so myself!

I should also mention that Brad and Sarah constructed the foil wrapped, cardboard base that the cake is sitting on.  Our baking sheets weren't quite big enough for this cake!

As long as I'm giving credit where credit is due, I should thank Pinterest for our inspiration for the cake.  We love Pinterest!