Baking the Star Wars Cake
This labor of love is also a result of my love for smittenkitchen.com. The cake is Deb’s Best Birthday Cake. It is filled with her Mango Curd and frosted with her Swiss Buttercream, the instructions for which include the directive, “Patience, young Jedis.” As per her brilliant layer cake tips, I made the mango curd and frosting the day before, and brushed the cake with a combination of simple syrup and lime juice to preserve its moistness.
The Origin of the Star Wars Cake
Several months ago, my amazing boyfriend was brainstorming menus for movie-themed dinners at his restaurant, just as a lark. We came up with Mama-Fratelli’s-pasta-themed Goonies dinner, and a Pulp Fiction burger dinner with $5 milkshakes. And as every movie conversation with Cristo invariably does, he came around to Star Wars, joking that I should bake and decorate an enormous cake to look like a Star Destroyer. And so I planned to do this for his birthday.
I bought enormous 17″x11″ cake pans. I researched visual references, tracking down schematics and hi-res images of Star Destroyers. I was even planning to pass over it v-e-r-y s-lo-w-l-y with a video camera and splice that footage into the opening sequence of the movie, with parody exposition-reel. It was very ambitious. But the idea of, realistically, ending up with enough cake to feed twenty or thirty people when it’s really just the two of us (and whoever we can drag over to eat some) bothered me. As did the idea of storing a cake that size. Then, last weekend, Spike or USA or one of those guy-networks was playing the first movie in the only Star Wars trilogy, and I was inspired. My boyfriend didn’t grow up dreaming of being Imperial scum! I would use the recipes I had researched, and the food-coloring and piping bags I’d purchased, and I would make a Millenium Falcon cake.
And so I did.
at 10:09 am
I consider this your wedding cake because this man could never leave you after making him this cake. WOW.
at 9:15 pm
Medium’s got it right, yo. I don’t know enough about Star Wars to judge likeness, but I know enough about cakes to declare this the winner of the “Best Cake I’ve seen on Blog” competition.
at 5:47 pm
Awww!! Thanks, hon.
We ended up bringing it to our local bar, where all our friends were either working, drinking, or DJing, and it was much-loved.
As is he!!