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!