Love the Bomb

I set out to do a different threadcake, but found that someone had done that one pretty much perfectly in one of the previous years, and I didn't think I could top it. I discovered this while the cake was in the oven, so I had to scramble for another option. Luckily, this design called for roughly the same shape cake, so I made the best of the situation.

I had hauled out a trusty cake mix and baked it in roughly a loaf-shape. The problem with baking a cake like that is it's really hard to get the baking time/temperature right, so the top started burning while the middle was still raw. Once I'd gotten rid of the assorted burnt bits, I got the cake carved down into the body of the bomb. Once I had roughly the shape I wanted, I split the cake to add jam and buttercream, then put it back together to finish fine-tuning the carving. I hollowed out a section for the support dowel, then covered the whole thing in buttercream and fondant.

I decided to make the rest of the bomb out of rice krispie squares, so I made two circles (one with a hole, the other with a dent), covered them in white fondant, then threaded them onto the dowel that was now sticking out of the back of the cake. Once everything was in place, I added the details, like the checkerboard strip and the rivets.

I decided to scratch some of the details onto the fondant before painting, so I grabbed a skewer and got to work. Once everything was roughly to my liking, I did the outlines and the coloured sections using food colouring pens and then filled everything else in with black airbrush paint. I had been puzzling over how to do the clouds, but it turned out that white candy floss does nicely, although it's rather temperamental about how it's handled.

Next, I got to work on the little man (this is when my camera batteries ran out, so no pictures of that process). I bent a cakepop stick, then started building up the body using white gumpaste. I used food colouring pens for the clothes and wired the arm and hat to each other. I grabbed some spare rice krispie squares to form the head and covered that in fondant. I stuck it all together and popped it onto the cake. I bent another cakepop stick and formed a gumpase arm around it. I stuck that into the cake, and hoped my camera batteries had charged enough to take the picture before gravity started messing with me.

I got the picture, then marched the cake onto campus to get eaten. Turns out, the airbrush colour wasn't entirely dry, leading to my loyal band of threadcake-eaters getting their hands covered in black paint. The things they do for love of free cake...