Jedi in the Making

In the middle of icing a Light Saber cake for one of my little buddies, my husband said to me, “You know, the final stage of becoming a Jedi Master is to make your own Light Saber.” I laughed at him, and told him to step away from the icing, but deep down I took it as a compliment. One of my Best Friends is in the middle of a move and without a working kitchen, and her son wanted an orange Light Saber cake for his birthday party. I offered to make the cake, and was flattered that she took me up on the offer.

I love making cakes. My cakes I know aren’t extremely fancy, as I am a food snob and will sacrifice flavor over “building” materials. At the request of the 6 year old, I made a favorite of mine, a carrot cake. Sticking to tradition I used cream cheese frosting….OK, I admit, I always use cream cheese frosting no matter what kind of cake I make because it’s really the only kind of frosting I think is not too sweet.

Like any creative endeavor you must know the strengths and limitations of your materials and set parameters. Parameters for this project included the need for the cake to be transported and for the size of the finished cake to fit onto a 14 x 17” tray. This is where the background entered the design. I needed a solution would encompass making a light saber that was not too short and squat in its proportions, but also not to thin, and use whole 9 x 13” cake need to be used. The back ground square helped fill all of these requirements! The other limitation that I am accustom to working with is the nature of the cream cheese icing. I learned a really great trick for icing cakes from another friend of mine. If you put the icing in one of those handy little icing bags and squeeze it onto the cake before spreading you end up with only minimal crumbs in the finished icing layer. Dark colors and food coloring are always a challenge. I know I could use the fancy paste color, but I just don’t. So to help with the darkness of the Light Saber’s handle I used some melted chocolate chips in that portion of the icing. (Guess which piece of cake my children asked for!) When working with cream cheese icing you do not have to compensate for the more fluid nature. Details become more of “impressions.” For this reason I tend to raid the candy stash in search of “details.” I used gummy candy for the buttons because I thought there translucence made them look like they glowed.

In the end, I was proud of the cake, but the true glory of the project was helping make my 6 year old friend a very happy birthday boy!