Wall-E Cake, takes 1 & 2

A few weeks back, we rented Disney's "Wall-E." Isabel was in love. We had the movie 3 days or so, and she must have watched in 4-5 times.

I decided to have a Wall-E themed party for Isabel's 5th birthday. Five! Aack! I digress.

I wanted to try my hand at a Wall-E cake and scoured the net for ideas.

Take 1

I went the fondant route the first time. That was A LOT of work. Click on the above picture. You can see my attempt at covering the "wheels" with fondant. Having to color fondant a velveeta cheese yellow, and black and grey was time consuming. I got frustrated.

Then, Florida had a cold snap. YES we did. It was 27 degrees one day. So, the heat in the house is on...and Wall-E became mush. Melted fondant mush. I was pretty much over it and Wall-E take 1 went into the garbagio.

Take 2

I found this Wall-E cake on the net. Isn't it fun? They used off-the-shelf cake mixes and icings. They did a great job, so I throught I'd try it this way instead. No fondant. Just icing and lots of it.

Icing the cakes was NOT fun. Box cakes are just too moist. They crumble. It was a mess. The grey strip was icing on their cake. There was no WAY I was going to apply gray icing over yellow icing. I decided to use a strip of gray fondant. THIS strip above was too thick and its weight slowly dragged it down the side. I took it off and made a new, thinner one.

Check out the mess above.

Yea. Not pretty. TEST RUN!

Then there was the "how do I make the arms, eyes, and neck" thing. I spent some time using cereal boxes to make the shapes, then I colored them with grey paint.

Below is sort-of the finished product. Sort-of because I did not paint the head/eye area grey yet, nor did I cover the neck with icing to hide the tube there. I didn't want to waste my time.

I need to make his eyes smaller, and they were a PAIN to make. (Aweee, droopy Valentine roses). And I think I'm going to cover the next cake in yellow fondant, but not the wheels. I like the wheels as is. I need to find black piping icing in a teeeeeny tube to make the words. These words here were made with little bits of black fondant and I don't like them. I'm also not going to use box cakes. I'll make a home made cake.

Oh, and I'll be ordering a back-up cake from Publix. :)

Update: Want to see the Final Take? Click here to see the Wall-E cake for the party.