Hi everyone,

I want to make a Pikachu cake for my son's Lad and Dad bake sale, but I have very limited sculpting experience (in cake). Specifically, I want to emulate this cake:



The torso seems pretty straightforward, and I was thinking of using pastillage for the tail (which isn't really visible in the pic, but is thin and lightning shaped). But, the head scares me. It looks kind of heavy and broad, and I would just worry about it falling off the cake or crumbling to pieces if I tried to sculpt it out of a single block of cake.

Does anyone have any tips for achieving this look? Or, maybe just address these questions:

- Would you use a solid block of cake for this (aside from the arms and feet) and just carve until you get the right shape?

- If so, I'm assuming you would start with stacked round cakes?

- Is it possible that the head is a separate material, such as krispy treats?

- What about the arms and ears? How can those be achieved?

- I was thinking about using the durable chocolate cake for 3D modeling found in the recipe section. Good plan?

- For the crumb coat, prior to the fondant, what type of buttercream is recommended? I usually make a swiss meringue buttercream, but don't do much fondant work.

Thanks for any advice you can give!

I would think that it would be hard to get the head to stay on with it being about as big as the body. I would try using rice crispy treats as the head..it would be lighter and you could put a long dowel down the middle to help hold the head, and I would probably use those as arms too. If you think that's not enough cake you can always do a sheet under it and sit it on top, then decorate the cake like the cake board shown. Or if you do that then you can make the whole pokemon out of RCT.

Thanks so much for the reply! Anyone else have any ideas?

Also, if you were to fondant the head and torso and then attach ears and arms, how do you blend in the fondant so the seams don't show? I can't imagine you could actually fondant the ears/arms/body/head all together at once.

Just an update, in case anyone is interested. The final cake came out like this:



Pretty far off from the original inspiration, but still fun. I followed the advice above (thank you!) and made the head out of RKT, as well as the ears and forearms. The original idea was to have Pikachu sitting on top of the pokeball, but the pokeball came out looking very clean, so I decided to have him perched on the edge. Kind of made him look too much like a dog, but it worked.

Thanks again for the advice!

Okay, so the image didn't work. It's located here in the CakeCentral gallery, if interested:

http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2031407

Your cake turned out adorable! Great job!

Thanks very much!