Mario mushroom cake and an R2D2 cake

Do you love Super Mario?

Veruca Salt made not one, but two character birthday cakes last weekend. Pocahontas wanted a Super Mario mushroom cake, the special 1Up power up mushroom that gives you an extra life extra power/health in everyone's favourite childhood video game. [Thanks to fushmush and FFichiban for the correction]

This cake was reasonably easy to construct - butter cake cut to size and then decorated with tinted vienna cream frosting. The white parts were fresh whipped cream and the eyes were cut from a licorice strap.

Whilst I can take no credit for the mushroom cake (I mainly acted as colour consultant), I did have a small hand in the R2D2 cake, specifically requested by Rolfe, a Star Wars tragic.



I'd been very nervous about the logistics of creating an R2D2 cake, especially after seeing chocolatesuze's commendable effort -- particularly impressive considering she'd never even seen the movie!.

We used four layers of butter cake, the body was a double layer, and the head cut from another double layer. A photocopied picture of R2D2 was a handy cutting template. Some trimming was required to ensure everything lined up height-wise. We used fresh whipped cream for the white areas and tinted vienna cream everywhere else. The black outlines were done with licorice, cut into long lengths of "string".

I convinced Veruca to create a 3D eye-piece by cutting a cylinder from the leftover cake and covering it with grey frosting and then a circle of licorice.

The twentysomething-year-olds were like little kids at the sight of their cakes. I think it only goes to show you can never be too old to have a character cake!

If it were your birthday tomorrow, what character/novelty cake would you choose?


Related GrabYourFork posts:
Shark birthday cake