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

By Annie Holland | May 24, 2008

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 very nice and detailed sketches of it before I even started to bake. Again, if somebody is interested, I will post them.
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.