In my opinion, a birthday is a perfectly legitimate excuse for my kids to enjoy some sugar and artificial colors, so each year I set out to make and decorate a cake to go along with their theme. Now, I am NOT a professional cake-decorator at all, so my cakes always look very, um, homemade. But that's OK, my kids love it and it is fun for me too. This year, I came up with an R2D2 cake for my newly-5-year-old, who is having a Star Wars themed birthday party. I took a few pics of the process so you can follow along if you would like to make your own. Enjoy!
First, you need to make your cake. For this cake you need one 9"x13" cake and one round 9" cake. Trim off about 1/4 of the length of the rectangular cake and cut the round cake in half. Use the larger rectangle for R2's body and one semi-circle for his head. Cut the smaller rectangle in half for R2's legs and cut three wedge shapes from the remaining semi-circle for his feet. Assemble the cake with toothpicks as shown below. Put strips of wax paper under the edges so you can slide it out after you are done frosting the cake.
Prepare R2D2's buttons and lights. You will need some graham crackers, blue frosting, and large and small Oreo's. You will need all the shapes shown below, plus one extra large square with a large Oreo:
Tint some white frosting with a small amount of black food coloring to make it gray. Remind your assistant not to eat all of the frosting with her graham cracker dippers.
Now frost the head gray, the body, legs, and feet white, and add the buttons and lights as shown. You can add additional lines and markings with black and blue frosting if you want. And when you are done, you will end up with something like this, and a very happy Birthday Jedi!
Cute!! That looks terrific, and much, much better than some "professional" R2D2 cakes I've seen. Happy Birthday to your kiddo.
Posted by: kelly | August 16, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Awesome Cake!!! What a lucky little Jedi. Ula, you did a wonderful job. Those cakes are so much fun to make. I remember the "rocket cake" I made for his dad when he was this little guy's age.
Posted by: Giga | August 16, 2008 at 11:23 AM
that is awesome!
Posted by: ssoston | August 16, 2008 at 12:55 PM
That is so cool! He must be thrilled. I hope he has a great birthday! :)
Posted by: Tara | August 16, 2008 at 02:07 PM
Cute cake! Happy birthday to your little man!
Posted by: KatydidCreations | August 16, 2008 at 09:26 PM
I have been looking for an easy way to do this... THANK YOU!
Posted by: Amanda | May 31, 2009 at 12:49 AM
Thanks so much for posting this!! We're going to do a practice cake this week. Much cheaper than a $55 cake pan!!
Posted by: Ricebird | October 27, 2009 at 03:07 PM
I just found this post after searching for an easy R2D2 cake, and I used this as my son's fourth birthday cake. He loved it! I linked to you on my blog. Thanks!
Posted by: twosquaremeals | March 23, 2010 at 03:57 PM