Sunday, June 30, 2013

Baking Up Fresh: Dr. Who Birthday Cake

Happy weekend friends!  It's mid summer, the Pittsburgh Pirates are in first place in the MLB, and we are rocking the baking as we head into the July 4th holiday weekend.  If only summer time was a little cooler so we didn't have die slightly every time we opened the oven.

This weekend we've been busy baking a themed birthday cake for our baby brother.  He's finally turning 21 (huzzah!!) and we decided to surprise him with a Dr. Who cake to ring in the anniversary of his birth.

Haven't seen Dr. Who?  It's ok, we haven't either.  So it was a little challenging when we decided to make this cake, since we don't even know what the show's about. (since making this cake, a doctor, who can apparently change actors depending on the season, can time travel, or something like that, and tries to save the world.  We think...)

All we know is the one lady in Dr. Who is also in The Office.  So we found some comfort in that.  At least it wasn't too weird.

Since we can't make a cake of Nellie (how creepy would that be to see!!??!?!?!) we decided to go with the classic Dr. Who image: the Tardis.


We have no idea what this is actually used for in the show.  We think it's for time travel, but don't quote us on this.  We still haven't seen a single minute of this show.  However, if you type "Dr. Who" into google we guarantee images of this pop up.  So we thought, why not, let's build a Tardis out of cake.

Sounds simple...pretty straight forward too.  We forgot what a pain in the butt dying fondant navy blue is, though.  Since it's cheaper to buy fondant in bulk white, we hand-dye 95% of all our colored fondant, the only exception being black.  The darker the color is, the harder it is to dye...which is why we buy our black fondant.  But navy blue...that's about as close to black as you can get, which means it's going to take a lot of dye, a lot of kneading, and a LOT of time to get the right color.

To give you a perspective of time, it took us almost an hour to get our navy blue just the right color.  Partially because we're perfectionists, partially because we added too much black dye and it started to veer into the "grey" category.  With some work, though, we got it into the perfect shade we were looking for.  After that, it was just some simple decorating, and the cake was good to go.

Here's the finished result...what do you think?


Pretty close if you ask us.

What we loved about this baking challenge was our own lack of understanding on this cake theme: we've never seen the show, and it's not like we have the time to sit down and watch 10 episodes to get into the feel of the cake...we had to just jump right in and hope for the best.  Thankfully this show has such an iconic image we could use to replicate into a birthday cake.

Enjoy your holiday week, it's supposed to be beautiful out!!


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