You know when your idea is greater than you have energy for? This Planet/Space/Solar System Cake was mine!
I started with a double chocolate cake mix. Yes I use cake mix, I don’t consider it cheating when you spend the next 15 hours decorating it. Two 10″ with Buttercream icing in the middle. I also packed mini M&M’s on the BC so the kids had to search for “Moon Rocks” – they loved it.
I then covered cake in BC and Marshmallow fondant coloured heavy with royal blue gel. I was reminded again to always let your fondant sit overnight. It won’t fold as much and will be 100% easier to work with next day. Then I made a double recipe of rice crispies and with the help of a science web site made some planets and huge sun. I packed them as hard as I could into balls and popped then onto skewers to sit and cool.
Next day I took each planet and rolled it aggressively on the counter to smooth the surface out. Worked great. Covered in icing and then white fondant. Back on the skewer to harden. Then off to use the left over fondant to make tons of stars of all sizes. I knew this cake needed lots of stars because my fondant wasn’t perfect! Made rocket ship too – super basic.
The rocket is a big leaf cutter the sides are 1/4 sections of a circle. With everything covered in fondant I was off to airbrush the 9 planets, sun and blue cake. Fun part, had to use lots of google images for this part. I made my own stencil for a shooting star and air brushed in silver along with a silver coloured star x5. Let dry hours.
Put on all the decals with a dot of water each. Took a long time- get a chair. Then measure out the dowels for the sun to be supported, I used 4 cut to measured length. I then got out the real tools and coiled some 14 gauge wire around a Sharpie pen to support the planets. This was fun, but consider the weight and distance from sun. Pluto was easy but Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune were so heavy I used a wooden dowel in the coiled wire for help. My advice would be to mount these as Vertical as possible for weight distribution. I put the heavy ones in after delivery, I was too nervous the weight was going to tip the sun and ruin the fondant.
I had so much folding in fondant at the bottom of the cake that I coiled a 19 gauge wire in whatever shapes using a pen and wire cutter. Go around circumference of base, it worked great to distract the eye. And just like that it was done.
Even though this cake was a lot of work and time I learned so much about cake building and our solar system! Happy creating.
You did an outstanding job! Very cool cake. :-)
I love this cake!! Great job! And thank you so much for explaining it all so clearly.
I love the cake and the excellent explanation you provided. I have a soon to be 6yo who adores Astronomy and he wants a solar system birthday. Hope our cake turns out half as beautiful as yours!
That cakes looks out of this world! There is no way in hell errrr solar system i could do that for my son’s upcoming bday :'(
I loved this cake!!! We are doing a solar system project. I knew i wanted it to edible, “so we didnt have it come back home” we tried melting candy… ouch! Then i thought cake so i looked for decorating ideas, and saw yours. Perfect!!! “Dont worry i wont copy it exactly we all have to put our own twist on thing” Thank you so much for sharing your ideas with others.
you did a fantastic job on the cake
i have done it for my brothers 7th birthday.
thank you sooooo much