Okay so let me start off by saying I am NOT a professional cake maker, and I'll probably never will be..BUT I must say, I am awfully proud of this first time attempt, so I'm just going to blow my own horn for a moment *toot toot* Ahhhhh, I feel so much better now.
Get serious for a moment, lets (a bit of Yoda there for ya!)
So obviously my boyfriends birthday is coming up, and year after year I have made him a cake. One year I did him a cookie monster cake another year I did him a delicious chocolate covered cake with chocolate on top of that! And so on and so on, this year I thought 'I need to top it, I need to give him a fantastic looking-cake..a cake which will make all the other boyfriends say to their girlfriends 'YOU NEED TO MAKE THIS FOR ME!' And then it came to me, he has this Star Wars game thing on his phone which he is never not on (don't get me wrong I LOVE Star Wars, LOVE LOVE LOOOOOVE, but he has a different type of love for it..okay that sounded weird..not like that!!) And when we went to see the new Star Wars movie, we both fell in love with BB8, he's so cute! So that was it, I knew I had to make him this!
Ingredients/Tools I used
Caster sugar
Butter, softened
Eggs
Self- raising flour
Baking powder
Milk
Icing sugar
Food colouring of your choice
A large hemisphere cake pan
A small hemisphere cake pan
Renshaw ready rolled white icing
Renshaw ready to roll orange icing
Renshaw ready to roll grey icing
Renshaw ready to roll blue icing
Renshaw ready to roll black icing
Rolling pin
Edible glue
Method
Pre-heat your oven 190 degrees/ fan 170 degrees/ gas 5. For the actual cake itself I just made a basic Victoria sponge cake, which you can find in any baking recipe book or even on the internet. I then put the poured the mixture into the large hemisphere pan (I only had 1 so I made the mixture twice, but if you happen to have 2 you can just make a larger batch and pour it equally in both) the cake takes about 20-30 minutes to cook. Once it is ready take it out of the oven a leave to cool completely before taking it out of the pan (this is where I went wrong, I was being impatient and I just took the first cake straight out and it basically fell apart..I almost cried..but pulled myself together and made another one) So now you have 2 lovely round cakes, now its time to move onto BB8's cute little head. For this, I used the exact same recipe as before I just quartered the ingredients, I then poured it into a small hemisphere cake pan and left it to cook for about 15 minutes.
So now you have your lovely ball shaped cakes! I went round the cakes with a bread knife and trimmed off any excess cake that wasn't needed. I also cut the bottom of the cake so it was flat and wouldn't roll off without my consent, I also did this with the top of the cake where I want to place the head later on. Now its time to make the buttercream! Again you can find this recipe in any book or off the internet again. Once I made the buttercream I added orange food colouring to the mixture (although now I look back, I really didn't add enough food colouring, it was more of a peachy colour)
I then covered the entire cake in buttercream, including the little tidgy cake. Now the part I really struggled on, but I'm sure you will do much better than me! I bought all ready rolled white icing, thinking this would make my life so much easier..oh how I was wrong. I made sure I held the icing in its packaging for a couple of minutes to give it some heat to stop it cracking, then I carefully placed the icing on the big cake (BB8's body) and I smoothed it round tucking it and cutting any bits of it I didn't need, however when I did this it started tearing around the cake. I clearly did it wrong! At this point I was more close to crying, I think 1 little tear may have sneaked out of my eyeball. At this point I had to ask Darren for his advice (by the way, he did know I was making this, I didn't just ruin it for him) so after a lot of bickering and swearing we decided to just do another layer of the ready rolled white icing (I would advise to buy a few of these just incase your a numpty like me) luckily this turned out to be a success, my only worry now is that it will just taste way too sickly, being full of icing can make it quite sickly, but I'll keep you updated about that as we haven't cut into the cake yet! Now do the same with his little head, cover it with the icing and just make it as smooth as you can (luckily because it is so small, its so much easier to handle!)
Now its time to make all of his accessories..sorry gadgets.
Roll out your ready to roll orange and great icing and shape them with any tools you have in your kitchen. For his orange circles I just used the small hemisphere pan and then cut another hole in it which a smaller cutter, for that I used a small drinking glass. I made 4 of those but you can make as many as you'd like! I then arranged them on a baking paper and made the extra little gadgets with a knife and my hands to shape them correctly. I did this with all of the extra grey parts and everything else you see. When I was happy with what I made, I put the head on the body..finally! I was quite surprised at how it probably would of happily stayed there on its own, but I wanted to make it secure so I just added a couple of toothpicks and attached it to the body. IT'S ALIVE! Once the head was securely on, this is when I added my creation I made with the icing, I just looked at a picture of BB8 to see where the right places were to put them on, but you can really just use your imagination. To make them stay on I used edible glue (which, can I just say? I only discovered this amazing invention the other day and I just had to buy it! I mean its edible glue!! Give these to the children at nursery school and you won't have a problem anymore!) I then just rolled up a bit of the black icing to make his eye and a little bit of the blue to look like a little button.
AAAANNNNND that's about it really! I can't tell you how stressed I was about it and tearing some of my hair out now and again, bit it was totally worth it because this was the end result! So if you do fancy giving it ago yourself, I would just like to say a very good luck to you and I would love to see some pictures of your end results!
As a wise man once said "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try"
So why not? Give it ago! And let the force be with you.
