Darth Vader got Iced

Ohhhhhh yummy chocolate cake.......this is a super yummy one too....Chocolate Chocolate Chip. Made extra moist. Now I am totally not a big chocolate cake person - cut me a piece of white cake or banana or something with spice in and a delish buttercream icing - but this chocolate cake is worth breaking a calorie count.

And this is the way we start a fun cake. This particular cake was for a friend of a friend. Her son was having a birthday party and loves........the ultimate kid fiend........Darth Vader!!

Honestly I had no idea what-so-ever how to make Darth Vader. Yeah I saw the movies, but there was no way I am ready to try to carve out his face and lay fondant over it to be 3D - so instead we went 1D with a tiny bit of 2D added in.

I found a good picture of Darth Vader online - printed that out to the size I was looking for. Then cut each shape as a template of the face - starting from the largest image - placing that on the fondant and cutting around it with a small knife. After finishing with one piece I would cut the template smaller for the next piece and just kept doing this until I had each piece for the face.

First I cut the base shape - then (if you look close you can see) I cut the helmet shape and placed it over the base - then another ridge along the face area to make it have some depth above the face. For the actual face I cut a few shapes to make it look like the face had some dimension too.

That done it still looked flat. So we added some shading..........

In the mean time I placed a layer of fondant over the cooled and icing crumb coated cake. Still learning how to lay fondant well - and rolling it out on a laminate counter top that has tiny little grooves no one notices until sugar adheres to it and your fondant gets stuck - you can see that the fondant is not PERFECT. However, I am excellent at figuring out how to forge ahead and fix stuff.
Yep - that is right - this bad boys face covered up the little holes that were made when I was laying the fondant out. It may also be noticeable that there is now some shading done on the face and Darth looks a tiny bit more realistic in a 1D fondant sort of a way.

After putting the face on the cake it looked a bit black and white - and maybe boring. So I brainstormed - alone - in my own brain - and tried to think of what else might work and not take away from Darth's image........what is another Star Wars kind of thing that would work??

Not long into the thinking it dawned on me.......Light Sabers!! One red and one blue. I guess if I were going with just Darth it would have been two red, but my 9 year old had entered the room by then and he said that a boy would want to have both so that he could pretend in his head that they were fighting. Really? Okay - I guess.

So once that decision was made the Light Sabers were added and the Birthday Boys name was added. He lite up when he saw it........yeah!

This cake was Chocolate Chocolate Chip (as I mentioned in the beginning) with a Vanilla Buttercream and a Vanilla Fondant.