![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My son-in-law the Whovian's birthday was approaching, and my daughter commissioned a TARDIS cake for him from a friend. In a fit of insanity, we decided that we needed Dalek cupcakes as well, and that we should be capable of making them. After all, we had both seen a few beautiful large professionally done cakes as well as any number of messy mini-ones, and we thought it could be fun.
I found Dalek plans online so we could plan the scale properly. The one thing she was adamant about was that they taste good. After a series of simple (to me) yet indecipherable (to her) sketches, we were ready to bake cupcakes and buy the other pieces-parts. I own weird diamond-shaped silcon cupcake molds, which worked well for the skirt. A halved regular cupcake made the collar section, three wafer cookie the base for the cake-ball head. It would be frosted with a buttercream, and the arms would be crafted out of white chocolate. Since they were going to be standing out at room temperature, I decided to try a stablized buttercream. (Very long and involved process, and next time I'll just go with a regular buttercream.)
I put together the cupcakes with ganache and frosted the bases, and here's where the problems started. The dalekanium spheres were Sixlets, bought in bulk from B.A.Sweeties, and a mess to put on, being slippery, and the frosting wasn't thick enough for them to sink in easily. This resulted in little silver spheres bouncing around the kitchen (buttercream frosting is buttery, resulting in slick fingers.) Equal amounts of hilarity and frustration ensued.
The second messy part was the arms. Both my daughter & I had worked with white chocolate before, and both of us were magically unable to do so for this project. The gun arms ended up being pieces of paperclips messily bonded with dabs of white chocolate, rather than the elegant design on paper. The plunger arms were chocolate cigarettes with chips attached rather than white chocolate creations. The only good part of the white chocolate fail was having a supply of broken white chocolate pieces to make the collars, rather than piping it in buttercream. The heads went together more-or-less as planned, and with copious amounts of frosting were stuck to the bases. They were shrouded in wax paper and stuck in the freezer until party time.
When they arrived at the TARDIS, they were exactly the right size. They surrounded it, and when my big brother spotted them, he yelled in his best Nicholas Briggs voice, "MASTICATE!"
I found Dalek plans online so we could plan the scale properly. The one thing she was adamant about was that they taste good. After a series of simple (to me) yet indecipherable (to her) sketches, we were ready to bake cupcakes and buy the other pieces-parts. I own weird diamond-shaped silcon cupcake molds, which worked well for the skirt. A halved regular cupcake made the collar section, three wafer cookie the base for the cake-ball head. It would be frosted with a buttercream, and the arms would be crafted out of white chocolate. Since they were going to be standing out at room temperature, I decided to try a stablized buttercream. (Very long and involved process, and next time I'll just go with a regular buttercream.)
I put together the cupcakes with ganache and frosted the bases, and here's where the problems started. The dalekanium spheres were Sixlets, bought in bulk from B.A.Sweeties, and a mess to put on, being slippery, and the frosting wasn't thick enough for them to sink in easily. This resulted in little silver spheres bouncing around the kitchen (buttercream frosting is buttery, resulting in slick fingers.) Equal amounts of hilarity and frustration ensued.
The second messy part was the arms. Both my daughter & I had worked with white chocolate before, and both of us were magically unable to do so for this project. The gun arms ended up being pieces of paperclips messily bonded with dabs of white chocolate, rather than the elegant design on paper. The plunger arms were chocolate cigarettes with chips attached rather than white chocolate creations. The only good part of the white chocolate fail was having a supply of broken white chocolate pieces to make the collars, rather than piping it in buttercream. The heads went together more-or-less as planned, and with copious amounts of frosting were stuck to the bases. They were shrouded in wax paper and stuck in the freezer until party time.
When they arrived at the TARDIS, they were exactly the right size. They surrounded it, and when my big brother spotted them, he yelled in his best Nicholas Briggs voice, "MASTICATE!"
