This Star Wars-themed cake by by Cup A Dee Cakes includes so many loving, nerdy details: panels, access hatches, floodlights, all in an array of edible hues.
The baker blogged,
Each year we get to make a fantastic cake for a sweet little birthday boy named Kaben. His Mom gives us lots of freedom in terms of design and budget, so the cakes are fun for us to make. This is the first year that we haven't done a tiered cake, but we spent more hours than ever before.
The biggest challenge making sculpted cakes can be figuring out the structure under the cake that will hold everything up. It is scary and feels like you are more of a handyman that a baker. Having a cake with pipes and plywood also cut down the amount of servings in the cake. Our commercial refrigerator has a 22" wide door opening, so that limits our cake size and cake board. Most sculpted cakes are built on the board with the armature screwed in and everything secured down. When a customer needs a lot of servings and wants sculpted cake, you have to know your bakery's limitations. You may need to add sheet cakes or smaller matching cakes to fill the order. For this cake, I did need a lot of servings, about 100, and started the cake as large as I could while using my 22" cake board. To get as many servings possible and avoid making an internal structure, I used a sturdy mud cake and sculpted the cake out of one BIG hunk of cake. There were no supports, boards, wires or anything non-edible in the cake. All the rectangles of cakes shown are 11x 14" layers.
We've made a little movie to show how the progression of the cake sculpting. Since the "real" Millennium Falcon is fairly flat and pizza like, we decided to sculpt it at an angle to get more cake servings. We made the ships "stand" a little smaller and covered it in black Fondarific. The idea is that it kind of disappears and isn't very noticeable.
More: Cup A Dee Cakes blog [From 2014, via Between The Pages]
