Making a Dalek Cake: Part Two: Decoration

Welcome back to the Dalek Cake Saga, here follows my guide to turning a towering pile of sponge cakes into a greay dalek complete with eyestalk.

Decorating Your Dalek Cake!

Step One: This first step was the one which posed the greatest challenge in terms of decoration. I had to make grey butter cream, now I was without the aid of some of the lovely paste colours you can get from decent shops (and even online) so I had to make do with SuperCook water based black food colouring. Now, anyone who understand science will know that water and fat don't mix all that well together. So, mixing water based colour with butter was always going to be a trial. The solution however is to use a lot more icing sugar than you would usually. I also strongly advise making your icing up the night before as leaving it to stand will quickly show you if you have got the ratio wrong. If you don't have enough icing sugar it will seperate out into soemthing bad and nasty looking and you don't want that to happen on your cake.

The end result is a thick buttercream that looked like a bowl full of mortar.

Step Two: Coat the stack of cakes in this thick mortar like substance, I also piled it up quite thickly on the top of the cake to create a somewhat rounded top. You could, if you were more organised than me, have made a rounded top of cake which you would then just need to cover.

Step Three: Fashion some "weapons" - I used breadsticks for this. Again I cracked out my knife steel to make some preliminary holes in the cake rather than just forcing an easily broken breadstick through. I added a lump of black regal ice to the end of one to make the eye stalk. The regal ice was made black by kneading in a small amount of black food colouring. It gets sticky so add icing sugar to dry it out and really knead the colour in well. If you have trouble getting a dark enough colour you could buy some pre-coloured ready roll icing if you have a shop that sells it, or, mix the food colour with icing sugar to make a paste before mixing it into the regal ice. I also added a "sausage" of this black around the bottom of the dalek.

Then I used giant chocolate buttons to add the "bumps" that daleks have. I checked out a few pictures as well to check that they do have four in each column.

Step Four: Making an eyestalk was done in much the same way, with a bread stick and then a blob of blue coloured regal ice made in the same way as the black but with blue supercook instead. I then added two "lumps" of white regal ice to the top for the lights and voila! Dalek!

Making a Dalek Cake!

This week saw Tamsin's birthday and also saw me undertaking one the greatest challenges in my baking career. I set out with an idea, with a vision if you must, of what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to make a Dalek. I thought about it, and I foresaw only three problems:


1) How to stop it falling over.

2) How to colour butter cream because Tamsin does not like Regal Ice.

3) How on earth to cut it when finished.



So, I tackled the first two problems through a mixture of trial and error and a few phone calls with my father, picking his brains. The final product took about 6 hours to bake, assemble and decorate and required 15 eggs worth of cake mix. However, it tasted amazing and I am now here to give you the full story.



Making a Dalek Cake

Step One: Assemble a base for the cake. To give the cake the height it requires without it falling over it requires some support structure. I visited my local £1 shop and purchased a wooden chopping board and then to my local hardware store to get some dowling:

Step Two: Drill a hole in the centre of the chopping board and stand the dowling in it ensuring that it is a tight fit.

Step Three: Bake an awful lot of cake. This was like creating some creature from the deep in my oven as the largest cake tin started overflowing and coating the base of the oven. In total I baked 6 cakes of varying sizes, getting smaller in circumfrence and depth as I went.

Step Four: Extract all cakes from the over (all in all I spent about 3 hours baking) and let all of the cakes cool properly. My cakes came out slightly greasy around the edges as I was out of flour for the tins. I used kitchen roll to wipe them off a little but this is potentially risky as it can fall apart if the cake is very wet. Newspaper works on chocolate cakes however as you wont notice the colour if the ink runs.

Step 5: Carefully make a hole in the centre of each cake. I used my knife sharpening steel to do this as it was about right the diameter, but experiment with what you have in your own kitchens and then lower each cake onto the dowling. Don't try and force the cake over the dowling without making a hole first as you will most likely break the cake!

You can use some fillings in the cake as well, this will stop of being a mass of sponge. I used chocolate spread as Tamsin is very adverse to jam in chocolate cakes.

You can then move onto decorating your Dalek - See Part Two