I had intended to do a crazy, nerdy gingerbread thing for my husband’s work Christmas party, but I had a colossal failure. So instead I made a BB-8 cake. Which is fine, except I know it’s going to be a fairly common thing this Christmas and going forward. In fact I suspect cake decorators who are sick of Frozen cakes will suddenly find themselves inundated with requests for BB-8s. I hope everyone has sphere pans!
My toddler had never seen BB-8 before. To be fair, I made this cake the weekend before the new Star Wars movie even premiered. So she calls this “ball cake”, and now that BB-8 is appearing everywhere, she keeps pointing at the droid and shouting, “CAKE!” I may have warped her brain.
I didn’t take in-progess photos because I was too busy. If you want a great tutorial on how to make a BB-8 cake (albeit a much, much larger one), see Yolanda’s wonderful video here.
For mine, I used the Wilton Sports Ball Pan for the main cake and the Wilton Mini Ball Pan for the head. I used my recently acquired CakeFrame kit from Lakeland with just the straight piece to stabilize the main ball. The head is affixed with a skewer all the way through the head down into the plastic tube of the CakeFrame, plus three wooden skewers trimmed level to where the head rests on the body. The head has a small piece of foil-covered cardboard at its base, with the whole head then wrapped in fondant. I pre-poked a hole through that cardboard and foil so the skewer would go through easily.
The main coverings are fondant and the accents are modelling chocolate tinted orange or tinted grey and painted with silver food powder. I used the template linked from Yolanda’s site here, but I just printed it as-is and then cut the pieces using circle cutters and freehanding.
The bottom is cocoa powder held in by a fondant rope stuck to the board, and more cocoa powder was used to dust BB-8 all over since he’s a dusty sort of droid.
The eyepiece is covered with piping gel to make it look shiny.
Oh and of course, as is becoming tradition in my house, I made this a certified Christmas cake by sticking a fondant holly leaf and three red sugar pearls on it.
The Christmas party folks were delighted and consumed poor BB-8 before he could roll away to safety.
PS I just realized I didn’t post the first cake I made with the CakeFrame stand here. Hang on and I’ll put that in a separate post…
Awesome, you’re doing a great job
Awesome work.