I am (not) your father...

This cake was made for my boyfriend's other nephew. 8 year-olds are definitely less fickle. This particular 8 year-old is a great kid. A little smarty...in a good way.  His request was marble cake with chocolate frosting. I was given creative license to do whatever.

I had a few options to choose from and went with Star Wars.  Those of you who know me well enough know that I consider Star Wars boring and dumb and essentially what I like to call, "movie diarrhea". But it wasn't my cake so I wanted to make sure I put some great effort into it.

I went online and found a "Star Wars" font and made a stencil for the HB message.  I used my trusty Exacto knife again and cut the letters out of gum paste. They could have been smoother, but my Exacto blades were nearing the end of their sharpness and I had yet to purchase new blades.

Not too shabby and, to fans, obvious SW lettering.

I decided I wanted to go with arguably the most recognizable character from SW...Darth Vader. I looked to my trusty friend Google to find a good picture to make a stencil from, then used my parents' copier to make it the size I wanted.  I won't even get into the long, sordid story of all the tracing and drawing I went through to get a good stencil on firmer paper (i.e. an open file folder) but it took a while.  I packed up all of my supplies and headed over to the boyfriends' to finish up.

I baked the cakes and carved what was to be the 2nd layer using the stencil I made:

Not bad.  Then I colored my chocolate frosting black, frosted the bottom layer, added and frosted the carved layer and placed the lettering on there:

Getting somewhere.  The letters BARELY fit so I had to do something that you might not be familiar with. It's a technical baking term called "smooshing" :D. I had to smoosh the letters, and if you notice from the letters up in the 1st picture, I had to cut the little tail from the "B" so "BIRTHDAY" would fit.

Then I got to work rolling and cutting out the fondant shapes (stars and helmet).

All that white stuff is powdered sugar. I promise.

So the hard part. Making the helmet look like Darth Vader. I had some silver luster dust and some black sparkle frosting in a tube (Wilton, I think), so I mixed those together for a silvery frosting and went to painting.  There was trial and error in trying to figure out how to get the image on there because my stencil was really only meant for the outside shape, so I had to wing it for the most part and I have NO art skills.  I ended up laying the stencil on the fondant, lightly poking holes on the lines through the paper and into the fondant to give me a rough outline of the lines and then just referencing the stencil's detail, applying it to the fondant with a food paintbrush. It took hours, but again, live and learn.

This was the final product, after applying the fondant to the cutout later and sprinkling some gold edible stars on the bottom layer.

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I hate to toot my own horn, but...toot toot.