Chocolate Star Wars R2D2 40th Birthday Cake

My husband was very lucky for his 40th birthday. As well as some great presents including a 'carvolution' framed picture of all 9 cars he'd ever owned  - interestingly, they seem to have put their prices up quite a bit since I bought it a few weeks ago - and a meal at Hawksmoor, he had two birthday cakes.

We were spending his birthday with some of his family - more on this in another post as I will do a restaurant review.  In the evening after a day out in London we had a takeaway at his brother's house so he could put the children to bed and keep an eye on them. There were six adults but I knew that the following weekend we were seeing more of my husband's family with up to ten people - so I wanted to make him a birthday cake for his birthday but also another cake a week later.

He requested a chocolate cake and I planned a chocolate extravaganza for the bigger occasion, and had an idea for the other one quite some time ago. My husband has mentioned a few times a birthday cake he had as a child in the shape of R2D2 which he thought was brilliant - I thought it would be fun for him to have the same sort of cake when he turned 40!

I bought an R2D2 silicon cake mould for only £5 or so in the Lakeland sale back in January which I hoped would make the cake a doddle, though I wasn't sure how easy decorating it would be. In the end it was actually relatively easy.

The cake mould is quite large and it says on the box to use an 8-egg recipe; but other than that there wasn't any guidance. I spent a while googling 'what recipe to use for Lakeland R2D2 cake mould' and didn't really come up with much, so decided to use my trusty chocolate wedding cake recipe. This is the recipe from BBC Good Food that I used for the middle layer of my wedding cake and when I made the wedding cake of Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker. It works brilliantly every time and is a 10-egg recipe; I scaled it down to use eight eggs but had enough mixture left over after filling the R2D2 pan to make another 9-inch cake which I put in the freezer!

So I recommend that for the R2D2 cake pan you use a six or even five egg recipe; you can basically divide the quantities of the BBC chocolate cake recipe in half. You'd then need to adjust the cooking time and I'd advise keeping an eye on it and testing with a skewer - I think I baked mine for an hour and a half but didn't make a note as I was playing it by ear.

A lot of chocolate

The cake turned out perfectly and as always with this recipe was moist and super-chocolatey.

I had sprayed the pan liberally with PME Release-a-Cake spray, making sure I got into all the nooks and crannies. The cake came out of the silicon mould perfectly and you can see all the details of R2D2.

I wanted these details to show through when I decorated the cake so instead of covering the cake with buttercream, I brushed it with some warm runny apricot jam. I carefully sliced the cake through the middle and filled the centre with chocolate buttercream and then covered it with white fondant, rolled fairly thin, which I smoothed down so the details of the cake still showed through.

I then cut some pieces of blue fondant for the details and before I stuck them onto the cake, sprayed the white parts silver with PME edible silver lustre spray.

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme.