A Buzz Lightyear cake – tribute to Buzz, the best space ranger ever -Part 1

In the first posting about Buzz I showed you how I made the “skeleton” for Buzz, in the second posting I showed you how I made the body and the whole shebang, now is the time to show you how I made the cake and then you are going to see the whole cake setting ( Buzz and all).
The actuall cake recipes you can check here( the first part) and here( the second part).

Let me tell you before I start, that Christopher Kimball is a genius! It’s official! I am raving about his book the Dessert Bible again.
I have read almost every book there is about cakes and I have to tell you this guy is amazing!!! Well, if you are not ” follow the directions” kind a gal, look for another book.
I love him turning the kitchen into a science lab! He explains what, when, where, how and why that there is not a possible way of you making it wrong!
I wanted to try his cake recipes, but I didn’t got the chance until now, but this time I made even 2 🙂
For the first layer I made his ” Master recipe for All-Purpose Yellow cake”, for the second layer ” Devil’s Food cake”. Let me tell you- I have never ever made these two before. I have used only my Bulgarian recipes that are completely different from what is used here as layer cakes.
Both cakes turned out to be AMAZING! I made the lemon variation of the yellow cake and I used “Baker’s chocolate” ( unsweetened) for the Devil’s food.
These were the best, most moist, most fantastic cake layers I’ve tasted!
For the cream I made chocolate ganache from semi-sweet ” Hershey’s” chocolate chips and heavy whipping cream. I use slightly different recipe then the popular one.
If anybody is interested, I will post the recipes later.

So, I baked the cake, I froze it and cut the layers and then it was time to make it look like a space ship 🙂 I have found only one version of Buzz’s ship online, but I didn’t like it very much so I tried to improvise and follow the pictures I have of Buzz.

Now, don;t think I “got” the cake from the top of my head. I made sketches of it before I even started to bake.
So, dark-yellow, yellow-dark…the layers are going up and at that point I began to realize how big is actually going to be 🙂
I used home made decorator’s icing with lemon flavor.

I have never covered in fondant such a big and “bumpy” cake before. I was a little worried how am I going to do this, because rolling out such a huge piece of fondant in domestic setting is not an easy job. So I huffed and I puffed and …I rolled it out 🙂

Here my beloved husband is taking pictures of me at 12 am ( not very happy about it ;-)). What?? Try baking a cake with two tornadoes running around the house in bright daylight and then tell me I didn’t have to bother him! 🙂

At this point ( when I covered it completely with the fondant ) I left it overnight in the refrigerator and the next morning I continued working.
Now, whoever tells you a fondant cake is not supposed to be kept in the refrigerator, they don’t know what they are talking about. The fondant cakes are not supposed to endure a big temperature change in a short period of time, that’s all.

It finally looks a little bit like a ship:

Here is how I made the wings :

The wings are installed:

And the ” exhaust pipes” as well:

The buffer around the ship:

Side view:


Back view:
View from the top:

And the back again:

In the next posting you will see how I made the “fine work” and the finished cake.
You can check the next posting here.

Since a lot of people are asking, I guess the links I’ve posted in the posts are not visible enough, so here are all the instructions how to make my Buzz Lightyear cake


Dear readers,
I mentioned before that I have made sketches of the cake and I am getting a lot of e-mails to publish them. Unfortunately, I made the sketches 3 years ago and since nobody showed any interest in them at the time I probably have thrown them away, because I can’t find them. Take a closer look to the posted pictures of the actual cake pieces and I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out the structure.   
 
Let me know if you have other questions,
Annie