Know Your Nerds

I'd been hoping to get some cakepops into a competition entry this year, so when I saw "Know Your Nerds", it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

For the cake pops, I went off-book and made chocolate-cheescake pops (achieved by crushing up digestive biscuits and mixing them with chocolate philadelphia). I formed the mix into little nerd heads, set them on pikes (ok, sticks) and set to dipping. I used some thinned-out coloured candy melts for the hair and glasses. Since I didn't have access to a lot of my cake pop paraphernalia, I had to fashion some cake pop stands out of egg boxes. This was a poor choice. The pops kept falling over, and since my kitchen was particularly warm, the candy coating was never hard enough to resist damage, so they wound up with a few lumps and bumps.

Next, the cake. Because of how the design is laid out, I figured I'd need a two-tiered cake so that I could stand the pops in the cake, with the stats bars below and the additional symbols beside them. It took three packs of madeira cake mix to get the shape I wanted. In the absence of black fondant, I covered the cake in white and painted the whole thing with black airbrush paint (Sidenote: If anyone knows how to get black airbrush paint out of tile grout, I'm all ears).

I decided to do the stats bars separately and attach them to the cake, but I was worried that if I did them flat, they'd crack when I tried to fit them onto the curve of the cake. So I covered the cake tin I'd used with cling film and stuck some rectangular fondant cut-outs onto it. I scratched out the important points and then started filling it all in with food colouring pens. Rather than risking the colours running into the text, I decided to do the white text using some thinned-out white candy melts.

Once the paint had dried on the cake, I arranged the pops in it (spacing nine equidistant points on a circle is no fun) and attached the corresponding stats bars onto the lower tier of the cake. Using more white candy melts, I painted the icons on the upper tier of the cake.