As all 6-year-olds should, [Marc]’s son is a huge fan of Star Wars. For his birthday party, he wanted a Star Wars themed cake, and making one in the shape of R2D2 seemed to be right up [Marc]’s alley. Of course any clone of everyone’s favorite R2 unit should also display Leia’s distress message to Ben Kenobi, and [Marc] figured out a way to do just that.
Because of R2’s strange and decidedly non-cake shape, [Marc] first constructed a stand out of wood, cardboard, and a PVC pipe to hold the cake into place. The cylindrical droid body is of course made of cake and frosting, with R2’s dome made out of fondant.
The PVC pipe running up the center of the droid provided [Marc] with the ability to run a power and video connector up R2’s spine. These are connected to a small projector receiving video from a netbook placed out of the way.
You can check out a video of the R2 cake playing Leia’s holographic distress message below. At the end of the video, there’s a 6-year-old birthday party guest saying, “what is that?” It might be time to dig out the VHS player and the non-remastered trilogy, [Marc].
It always amazes me to see what americans think a cake is.
Hah! I agree that fondant isn’t exactly a gastronomical marvel and most of those amazing looking “sculpture cakes” are 80% tasteless sugar mass, but that doesn’t make them less “cakey” ;)
I scrapped the outside off before serving it. The inside is just normal cake mix and butter-cream frosting.
The American sheet cake is a celebratory obligation, like a greeting card or wrapping paper. It’s a substrate for candles and colorful whipped sugar-shortening goo, and serves as a centerpiece of a ritual by which the person being honored symbolically shares their well-wishings with other attendees.
Nobody over the age of 14 actually enjoys it except out of nostalgia. This is why you’ll never see “birthday cake” on the menu at a restaurant in America.
Cool! I wonder what he is going to do for his 7th birthday…
The real test is what am I going to do for my other son’s birthday. Every time I make one of these I feel like I need to beat on the next one or people will be disappointed.
wow
That is all kinds of cool, wicked job! Next year a Jar-Jar Binks pinata (any excuse to beat the crap outta that S.O.B!)
@ creekree & Eirinn – Yea fondant isn’t my favourite either buy icing and piping the same the same detail would be a pain in the ass.
I did a wally and eve for my girls birthday a few years ago.https://myspace.com/165728621/mixes/streammix-161890/photo/9725499
I agree about the fondant, that stuff is nasty, how can anyone eat that stuff. I wonder what could have been done with these cakes?
I wouldn’t allow my kid to play with the kid that asked “What’s that?” anymore.
NIce use of a Microvision ShowWX+ laser pico projector – fantastic little unit, I discovered that despite it defaulting to 60hz you can push it up to 75hz using PowerStrip on Windows, so when you’re playing back 23.976fps film footage you set the output to just under 72hz (3×23.976) which makes it look sooo much smoother than playing it at 60hz.
I bought it to make this and never got around to it…
http://hackaday.com/2011/08/08/diy-orb-display-puts-the-earth-in-your-hands/
I like fondant.
That is an awesome cake.
And I think you mean the unedited tapes, not the unremastered tapes. I own the unedited remaster, which came out before the Special Edition and the ensuing conga line of edits. Blue skies on Tatooine are nice.
epic cake sir