This cake was for a 3 year old who LOVES Little Einsteins.  Apparently all 3 year olds LOVE Little Einsteins!  The Mom let me borrow “Rocket” so I would have a guide for getting the proportions of the ship just right.  The characters in front of the cake are the actual characters that sit inside the toy version of “Rocket”.  According to the parents, Ethan (the birthday boy) noticed that “Rocket” was missing…they told him that Rocket went on a “mission” and that seemed to make him happy.  I guess he understood that Rocket had important things to do!

This cake was so much fun to make!  It was the first cake I designed and created–all the others are “recreations” of cakes from the Wilton yearbooks (which is a GREAT source for cake design ideas).  For the bottom part of Rocket “the belly”, I baked a cake using a football pan to get the pointy-oval shape with a little roundness underneath.  The “cabin” and the “engines” are made from rice crispy treats.  There was a LOT of carving work on both the football cake and the rice crispy treats to get the shape I wanted.  The red part of Rocket is regular icing, and the blue parts are made from fondant.  I used silver food-color “paint” on marshmellows for the headlights with small pieces of gold foil for the lens part of the headlights. You can’t see it from the picture, but I used the same gold foil on the rear engines to duplicate the look of the plastic toy.  The antenna and the round center part of the engines is candy.  The “fins” on top of the engines is cardboard–the only part of the cake that is not edible.  I was going to use crackers, but at the last minute decided that would look too thick.  By then it was too late to make gumpaste parts, so I went with cardboard (covered in icing, of course!).

This cake served ~65 people (not including Rocket).