Lego superheroes cake
Continuing with this week’s extravagant cake theme, this time the birthday boy had his heart set on Lego versions of his favorite Marvel and DC superheroes as portrayed on this beautiful cake – sadly I couldn’t trace it back to the original cake decorator to give proper credit, but whoever you are, kudos on the wonderful job and thanks for giving me a fantastic design to try and recreate!
The cake itself is as simple as they come: vanilla cake filled with italian meringue buttercream.
As for the decorations… well, how much time have you got? 😉
I started days in advance because I knew how much intricate detail was involved in making those figurines. In addition, square cakes are notoriously more difficult than round ones if you want to achieve those sharp edges, so I needed all the time I could get to prepare everything beforehand.
There are plenty of Lego tutorials out there but the one I found extremely useful was the one by the amazingly talented Zoe of Zoe’s Fancy Cakes. I used more or less the same process for my Lego Batman and adjusted the colors and various details for Superman, Captain America, Iron Man and The Flash. I inserted cake pop sticks into their legs and let them dry completely before drawing the rest of the details on with an edible black marker.
As for the rest of the cake construction, I used the double cake board method to get my corners as sharp as possible: after filling the layers with buttercream, I “sandwiched” the cake between two square cake boards of the same size (approx. 1/4″ larger than the actual cake layers) and started adding buttercream to the sides using the two cake board edges as my guide. It’s a fairly long process, which requires quite a few trips to the fridge between each layer of buttercream and especially whenever a gap needs to be filled in, or a corner needs to be refined.
When the sides of the cake were as good as they were going to get, I removed the top cake board and slathered some more buttercream on the top of the cake, then went back and retouched the edges and placed the cake in the freezer for a few minutes while I rolled out the fondant.
Both tiers were covered in a solid color – the bottom tier obviously green, the top tier in plain old white, to give the “lego pieces” something to stick to. When paneling a cake with fondant, it helps if you let it sit out once it’s rolled for a few minutes to stiffen up a bit – or, even better, give it a few minutes in the fridge so it won’t stretch and warp as you attach it to the cake.
The ruler is your best friend here: measure the panels to be just slightly bigger than the cake, align the piece of fondant with the bottom edge and one of the side edges, and trim the overhang with a sharp blade. I find that refrigerating the cake once again makes this job much easier, and an X-acto knife, flush to the cake, works perfectly.
After that, it’s just a matter of cutting out rectangular pieces of fondant to act as your Lego bricks. I measured the height of the cake and divided that by three, to make sure all my Lego bricks were equal in thickness. I used a tiny circle plunge cutter for the distinctive round disk connectors, and cut out a couple of rectangular shapes for the Lego bricks decorating the cake board.
To personalize the cake, I used a simple cookie cutter for the number 3, then placed it on some rolled out fondant of a different color and cut around the shape leaving a bit of overhang to achieve contrast.
The birthday boy’s name was a bit trickier: I downloaded a Lego font (this is the one I used), printed out the name and used it as a template for each letter, then glued it onto a thin black piece of fondant, cut around it leaving a bit of space, then repeated the process with a yellow background before finally gluing it on a red background.
Finally, I stacked the cakes, attached the name and number details and stuck the cake pop sticks supporting the 5 superhero figurines, using piping gel to glue their feet onto the cake for extra stability.
In the end, the cake turned out looking pretty damn close to the original, and made a special three year old boy very happy!
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