Chez PLJ

A few weeks back friend Virginia mentioned that Raymond Cusick, the designer of the daleks from Doctor Who, had died at the age of 84. We exchanged emails with simultaneous suggestions that we should raise a toast to his memory by making a dalek cake. Since the debut of the new season of Doctor Who was imminent, this somewhat tongue-in-cheek notion got added oomph; yesterday Vee, Peter and I concocted the following hijinx:

I made a pattern of the cake tiers we would need, and cut three 8-inch marble cakes (made the night before) into approximate shapes:

After my disastrous attempt at a cooked buttercream icing, which curdled horribly (icings not being in my areas of cooking competence), Virginia came to the rescue with a lovely buttercream with a perfect spreading consistency. We layered the cake pieces together, gluing them in place with a 7-minute frosting between slabs.

This was the point when we were thinking “what the hell are we doing?”:

Things didn’t improve much after priming (this icing layer was solely to catch and weld down stray crumbs):

Though once Peter started on the finishing icing layers it started looking better:

And after getting blinged out with accessories, it looked – well, maybe not fabulous, but certainly cute! The “dalek balls” were halved chocolate eggs; the brown panels and base were my attempt at chocolate fondant (a bit too stiff). The one arm and eyestalk were strawberry Pocky (we couldn’t find chocolate!) with fondant accoutrements (and mini M&Ms for the lens and “ears”), while the gun arm (a bit short) was a scored Trix bar. Finished dalek, looking warily at the knife:

And staring down a pineapple, placed for scale:

And apparently after firing a laser beam at said pineapple:

But as all good dramatists know, if you feature a knife in Act I you have to use it by Act III:

Mmmm! Dalekalicious!

Our fatally wounded dalek in its containment unit, ready to go into hypothermic stasis:

Huge thanks to Virginia for great fun and lotsa yuks doing creative stuff waaay out of any of our usual comfort zones!