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