3D Star Wars Darth Vader bear cake

As the year is drawing to a close, it’s time to update all the projects I’ve been working on this year.

This post has been waiting to be uploaded for a long time but I finally remembered to make it. I made this 3D darth vader bear cake for my boyfriend earlier this year for his birthday and surprised him with it at the mall of all places. I was deathly ill while making this cake but I really really wanted to surprise him with it so I spent the day making this cake and covering it american buttercream, then black fondant. It’s my first time covering an oddly shaped cake with fondant and my shapes/patterns.

In some areas the buttercream softened the fondant so much that the fondant broke which gave me a couple of heart attacks…but I somehow managed to either cover it up or just push it back together. I still have a lot to learn about working with fondant and 3D cakes. I probably should have used a stiffer consistency of icing…

But this is certainly one of my favorite cake pans and a go to for many different shapes. I’ve seen online people who use this cake pan to make rabbits, owls and other animal shapes so I’m excited to try those out!

3D bear cake

This is the 3D bear cake that I made for my friends Maggie and Joseph for their baby shower back in March. It was my first attempt at making a 3D cake and at first, I didn’t think it was going to work, I didn’t think I was going to come out of this alive!

I used the Wilton Stand-up Cuddly Bear Cake pan which can be found here: http://www.wilton.com/idea/Stand-Up-Cuddly-Bear-Cake

I suggest buying it from Michaels with a 50% off coupon, it’s probably cheapest there, at least locally.

First, I had no clue how  much batter to use for a Wilton 3D cake pan. They had the recommended amount but others online were saying it’s not enough etc. etc. etc. I think I ended up making 3 batches of batter and then I just poured it all in.

within the first 15 minutes I could tell that I’d put too much batter in my cake and it was like a volcano erupting and spilling all over my poor oven! So quickly I had to go and put a baking sheet under the pan covered with foil to catch the lava (exploding batter hahaha).

So that was fine, I lost some batter but it wasn’t too bad, it finished baking and everything. I let it cool before I attempted to pry apart the apparatus. I had heard that the cake really sticks to the pan. And I mean REALLY sticks! I used almost 5 tablespoons of shortening to grease the inside of the cake pan but it still didn’t do that trick. My cake ended up looking like this:

It was quite horrifying…MY BEAR HAD NO FACE!!!

After hyperventilating into a paper bag for a few minutes, I finally calmed down enough to figure out what to do next. After all, Maggie and Joseph were depending on me!

I figured, okay, american buttercream is like…whipped gold! It will make anything stick! So I pieced my poor amputated bear back together with buttercream.

Then I decorated the bear using probably one of my favorite tips, Tip#233

http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?sku=418-233

I made fur with this tip with brown/chocolate buttercream icing.

Then using a star tip Tip#16 I decorated the bear’s Canucks uniform because the happy expecting couple are big hockey/Canucks fans!

http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?sku=418-16

For the eyes and nose, I colored some piping gel with black gel food coloring and made blobbly circles. So what if my bear looks like he has a wet nose? It’s shiny! that’s all that matters! Yes…shiny things attract me.

So all in all, things turned out okay, I pieced back my bear, hid the bandaging with american buttercream (seriously, whipped gold!) and delivered an adorable, super moist and delicious cake.

For 3D cakes like these, you have to use a 3D cake mix. Usually you just add 1 box of pudding to 1 batch of batter and upscale as needed. I guess it would be kind of hard to downscale…unless you had a kitchen scale? Then you could measure out say, half or 1/3 of the package if you’re only making 1/3 the batter?

So bottomline: when at first you don’t succeed, don’t give up, buttercream will solve everything!

Hope you enjoyed my near disaster, would love to hear how you’ve fixed your cake miseries as well!