angharad_gam

I was a little bit more concerned about this cake. There was less of a sculptural element and more detail and it’s always easier to mess up the detail and end up with something that just looks wrong.

Anyway, here is the final product. Process below the cut as for the other. Also some pictures of the TARDIS Tent.

After the Sonic cake I went out and bought a proper palette knife (I used to have it, but it went walkabout some time ago) and also some of the proper cake decorators food colouring in a darker blue. This is about $5 for a tiny little jar, but it is a gel and so doesn’t make your icing runny. I still used about half the jar to get a blue this dark.

Step 1: Stick two block cakes together

I didn’t take a picture of this step because it wasn’t very exciting. I got two slab sponges and stuck them together with jam and some plain buttercream. I did trim the corners at the top to try and get that graduated roof thing that the TARDIS has.

Step 2: Cover in blue buttercream.

Also didn’t take a picture as it’s pretty obvious and all I ended up with was a blue block.

Step 3: Pipe on blue buttercream to create some of the textural detail of the TARDIS

Maybe I should have cut out squares to help me here, but I’m not sure it would have helped a lot as I am a fairly novice piper and it’s harder to pipe straight lines than it is to draw them.

Step 4: Use ordinary icing for the white details

I originally tried to pipe the windows on as separate blocks (each TARDIS window is actually composed of six small rectangular windows) but they just came out as blobs. I also mixed some ordinary icing with more of the blue food colouring to make the dark panel at the top (I have noticed some people making TARDIS cakes cheat and make this black writing one white but it is actually the reverse)

Step 5: The Writing

The white writing is in a white chocolate fudge writing icing. It also tasted disgusting (see the note on the black writing icing for the Sonic cake) but this time because of really strong fake vanilla flavouring.

Step 6: More details.

At this point Liam came up to have a look and said ‘Where’s the door handle?’ Not details focussed at all that boy! So I made a door handle. I also made a light for the top. I was trying to get this to stick in the middle of the top of the cake, but I couldn’t get it to stay there, even with the assistance of a toothpick.

So there you have it. I had ambitions to make a standing up TARDIS cake and also contemplated decorating the sides with windows etc, but I wasn’t confident on the capacity of the buttercream to hold up the other decorations under the influence of gravity. This was not as great looking as the Sonic cake I thought, but mostly because of the detail thing, and also because the TARDIS has a lot of hard edges and it is hard to make those in soft things like cake and icing.

Anyway, as if these things were not enough work, then there was the saga of the TARDIS tent. My parents originally intended to get Liam one of these for Christmas, but they were really hard to come by (only available in the UK and then they sold out before they could arrange for a rellie to get one and send it to them). Fortunately they became available on ThinkGeek last month so we snapped one up (well actually we ended up with two, but that is a story for another day when I don’t have washing to peg out).

We thought it would be cool to put the tent up the night before his birthday so he could get up in the morning and see it and all his other presents would be inside. Which was a great idea, except that this had to wait for a) Liam to actually go to bed, stay in bed and fall asleep and b) me to finish cake. So we started putting this thing together at about 11:30pm.

It took us an hour. It was really a struggle. The frame fit really tightly into the canvas, so that once one or two pieces were in place you had to really wrestle the next part in. It was quite a chore. But this was the result: