Mini Tutorial for Star Wars birthday cake (Storm trooper)

I am going to walk you through the steps to making a storm trooper birthday cake.  It is basically a double layer cake with marshmallow  fondant used to make a storm trooper face on the side.  

My daughter Bella and I holding up my son's cake for his 7th birthday.

The first step is to make 2 round cakes to stack on each other.  I had tried this in the past and had my cakes fall apart before reaching the plate so this time I used plenty of oil on the sides of the pan and parchment paper cut to fit the bottom of the pans.  This helped TREMENDOUSLY! 

I used a recipe called "Crazy Cake" (recipe coming soon!) that does not use eggs, milk or butter,and can be made chocolate or vanilla and is DELICIOUS!!  We are not allergic to dairy but this cake is so moist, delicious, easy and inexpensive that it is all we make!  I always get rave reviews.

 Once both of your cakes have cooled. turn one out onto the plate and frost with butter cream frosting, as this helps the fondant to stick.  I add strips of wax paper for this stage so that you can remove them once you are done frosting to protect the serving plate from frosting.  Now place the other cake flat side down on top and frost the top and all sides with the butter cream frosting.

Here is the fondant recipe I used from cut out and keep. It is very easy and has simple ingredients.

Once you have made your fondant and rolled it out you should now have one pretty small batch in black and bigger one in white. We didn't have black food coloring so we used food color gel in brown and dark blue till it came out as close to black as we could get it.  Now roll them both out to about the thickness shown in the following photo.  

 I folded the layer of fondant back so you could see what I was covering, but basically you just lay it over the top of the cake with enough to cover all the sides.  I overestimated for sure how much I would need!  Once it is all laid out you just trim with a knife around the base of the cake   You can see that i have strips of wax paper under the cake REMOVE IT BEFORE laying the fondant down.

 Once the cake is trimmed it will look like this.  You can see I made the mistake of leaving the wax paper under the cake and it was VERY hard to get out later.  Since it is only strips you should be able to remove it easily right before laying on the fondant.

Now all you have to do is cut out your mask pieces.  You can look at a storm trooper or this cake to see how you want to do it.  If you make a 3 layer cake you have more room for the mask.  Once the simple mask pieces are cut out ( I did the glasses part, 3 small slits off to each side of the glasses and mouth pieces), then you wet the pieces with water on the back so they will stick and adhere them.

 I used a fondant press with the words happy birthday to "write" in the top and added a candle. You're done!

It was fun and easy to make and my son LOVED it!  What more could you ask for?  I would love to know if you try it!