DIY Darth Vader Birthday Cake for the Novice Baker
How does one go about making a Darth Vader birthday cake, if one has very little experience making and decorating and very little artistic ability? The things absolutely necessary are a bit of courage – some might say overconfidence, time, and determination. Below I’m going to describe how I made this year’s birthday cake. Since I work, I had to do the majority of the work in the evenings, so I’m going to break out the tasks day by day. If you’re reading this because you want to make this cake because you’re going to save some money, well stop reading, and just go ahead and order the cake. The money savings won’t come until you’re on your 100th cake.
Day 1 – Prep
The first thing you need to do is find an image of a birthday cake that you want to replicate (remember, you have no artistic ability). Like this. Next, find a coloring page of the image you want on your cake. Simpler is better. Like this. While you’re at it, go ahead write out your text in Word or whatever software you want. You want to print the coloring book page and the text the same exact size you want it to be on the cake. Any text has to be mirrorred (I just flipped to paper over). Take a large cutting board (bigger than the size that your cake is going to be), and tape the coloring book pages onto the cutting board then put a piece of wax paper over it and tape that to the cutting board. You can use double-sided tape to stick the paper to the wax paper as well.
Day 2 – Supplies
If you’re going to make your frosting, this is the day to do it. If you’re buying your icing, find a store (like Michael’s or Wal-Mart) that sells Wilton products. I don’t know if you can use other brands, but I wasn’t going to find out. You need chocolate buttercream frosting for the parts that are going to be black and white frosting for the parts that are going to be white or lighter colors. For this step, I made a large batch of white icing and bought a 1 pound container of Wilton decoratory icing. You can store the icing in a closed container in the refrigerator – just keep it away from any strong flavors like fish or marinades. Oh, and you remembered to buy your cake mix too right?
Day 3 – Decoration Prep
Today you’re going to make a Frozen Buttercream Transfer to put on your cake so make sure you have some time. Start by getting the icing colors you’re going to need. I added black icing color to the chocolate icing to make black, black icing to the white icing to make grey, and red icing to the white icing to make red. This is the part where you trace your picture and text to eventually put on your cake. This website has a great instructions.
Take your cutting board with the picture on it and trace it with your border color. For me the border was grey. The website says to use a #3 tip and stiff frosting, but I couldn’t get that to work, so I used a wider tip like a #10 tip which resulted in a thick outline. The thick outline coupled with the fact that I had absolutely no practice using the decorator tip resulted in a pretty sloppy outline for me. Next time, I’ll practice a bit before I start on the drawing. Wait 15 minutes for the outline to set up, then start filling in. I used black to fill in. I filled in with the #10 tip, and it ended up being bit bit thick and resulted in a very stratified (wasn’t smooth like I expected it to be).
After allowing that to dry, put a layer of the base color of your cake. You can build the entire top of the cake this way, or just have seperate pieces to put on top of the cake. Once I was done with the Darth Vader figure and all the text, I was running out of white icing, so I decided to keep it in two pieces. Put a layer of wax paper over your work and put the entire thing in the freezer. I left mine in overnight. Store the left over icing in sealed containers in the refrigerator.
Day 4 – The Cake
Make your cake and let it cool overnight. I bought a 1/2 sheet cake size pan (size 18″ x 13″ x 1″) and used 2 white cake mixes in it. The one tip I would have is when you flip the cake out of the cake pan onto a cooling rack, just leave it upside down on the cooling rack. Then, the next day when you’re ready to work with it, you just have to flip it back over onto your cake surface.
Day 5 – Putting it all together
Today is the day you build the cake. Take the surface on which you’re going to build your cake (I used a sheet pan flipped over covered with aluminum foil, but you can also use a large cutting board or a piece of cardboard) and dab a bit of icing on the bottom to keep the cake from sliding and flip the cake from the cooling rack onto it. Level your cake. For some reason, I decided to buy a cake leveler last year, but I’m sure you can use a bread knife. If you can’t get the top exactly level, flip it over and just use the bottom. You can fill the uneven sides with icing and noone will be the wiser.
Put a thin layer of icing on the sides and on the top of the cake (which is referred to as the crumb coat in cake making circles). Take your buttercream transfers out of the freezer and immediately peel the wax paper off and flip onto the top of your cake. Be neat and be quick as the icing starts to thaw out immediately. You can finish icing the the sides and the top and blend the pieces. My frozen pieces ended up being really thick, so those parts of the cake were higher than the others. Once it dries a bit, you can put a border on. For this, I used Wilton’s red ready made icing tubes with a #19 star tip. It worked very well even though I had absolutely no experience making borders.
I used this description from this website to do my border:
With a comfortable grip on your icing bag, pipe in a straight line while alternating squeezes with releases. You can also adjust the speed in which you move your piping hand across. I usually pull while I am releasing and hold when I am squeezing. You can start each shell at the tail end of the previous shell so it looks like a continuous line. You will soon find a flowing rhythm and you’ll be able to put a border on a cake more efficiently.
And that is all! It was definitely amateurish, but I got lots and lots of compliments on it. I took several pictures, and when Tom gets some free time, he’ll post a picture into this entry. If you’re waiting to see the picture, feel free to let him know below.
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Do you have a picture of your finished cake?