Leonidas Cake and a Whole Lot of Faith in Mom

First off let me start out by explaining to you the cake that my son really wanted.  He is a huge fan of the movie "300" and wanted a cake of the main character Leonidas.  In his vision, Leonidas was posed in his famous open mouth, snarling, teeth bared kind of way with his shoulder back ready to launch a spear.  He wanted a 3D cake from the waist up, at least.  "You have to show his abs, mom" he insisted.  Of course I already knew that.  What's a cake without abs! Duh.

I thought and thought about how I was going to pull off this most amazing cake that I was trying to imagine.  I thought of all of the support and power tools I would need to do this.  Then my vision would fall short with Leonidas' face tearing apart and falling downward and gravity wreaking havoc on it.  After all cake is a soft medium to work with and not as easy and it may look.  I very quickly reminded myself that I do not have the knowledge to do such an elaborate cake.  I am self taught and have never had a single lesson.  But, my son only turns 16 once and he really had a lot more faith in me than I had in myself.  What to do....what to do.

Right then a light bulb came on!!  You can't just talk a 16 year old boy into something simpler when he has his mind set.  It had to be a clever and thought out rebuttal.  So I went to him and asked him what he thought the one moment in time was that made Leonidas the legend he has become.  He thought for a moment, his brow furrowed, but he couldn't figure out what I wanted him to say so he let me lay out my dramatic scene before him.  Well let me sell it to you and see if I could have changed your mind.....

Again, what is that one moment that Leonidas became more than just the leader of an army?  That precious moment where he would live forever in history?    He was just a rebel to those that wanted the change to happen, but there are many rebels that never even became a sentence on the pages of history.  There was a moment that he became more than a mere mortal man.  He gave his life for what he so truly believed in.  People want that kind of bravery; that kind of honor; that kind of courage.  (I was really pouring all I have into this heartfelt speech.)  So, to answer the original question, it was the very moment that he died that he became legendary!  That very moment!!!  Had he not died the story would not be as it has became today.  He died with integrity and grit.  He became immortal the moment his heart stopped beating.

Do you see what I did there?  Of course, I made it as dramatic as I could but, I sold him on the idea and got him to accept a horizontal cake!  Score one for mom!  Now to get to work on what we had finally agreed upon.  I couldn't make him an average cake since he did let me off the hook a little bit.  I had to at least make it large enough to be memorable.  

I must apologize for the low quality pictures.  Our camera was not charged and once I got started I did not want to quit.  These pictures are cell phone pictures but you can at least get the idea from them.

I drew out a sketch and decided to make the torso out of cake and the extremities out of rice krispies.  I could have done it all out of cake but he likes rice cereal treats and it did make it easier, albeit heavier.

 

 Rough sketch to give me basic proportions

The torso is strawberry cake.  All other extremities were homemade rice cereal treats.

I had baked a 12x18 inch strawberry with vanilla swirl cake and carved out the body then just rolled and shaped the rice cereal treats into the basic shape I wanted.

Cake covered in buttercream.

The next step was to fully cover it in homemade buttercream.  I knew it was not going to be easy for me to roll out a large enough piece of marshmallow fondant  that would cover and give me enough time to give the details I needed to each section.  I don't have a sheeter since I bake at home so I figured out where the seams would be covered and worked from there.

Torso and arms covered in homemade marshmallow fondant

I started with the arms first and covered them then worked with a ball tool to give him "muscle definition".  Then I rolled out more marshmallow fondant and covered the cake portion that would be his torso.  I worked quickly with my fingers to decide where to add his defining features and then used a ball tool to make them more enhanced.

There is a short break in pictures for the simple fact that I was working feverishly to get it all done and it honestly slipped my mind to take pics.  I am new at this whole blogging process so it may take me a bit to ease into telling the "whole story" but at least you get the feel for it.

The part that the pictures cannot show is that I covered each leg one by one and, again, shaped his muscles using my fingertips.  After all, our hands are our best tools.  After getting all of the flesh toned areas covered then I made his ears and attached them and tinted more fondant in a dark brown leather color and gave him his undies.  My son would argue with me that they are NOT undies.  In his eyes they are battle uniforms so I guess we will go with his remark instead. It did sound more manly.  It just did not look like Gerard Butler though, so I slipped a bit more fondant underneath them to make it look more accurate to the movie.  If you are going to be portrayed in cake you better make it manly! ;)  Then I put on the leather straps around his shoulders that holds his cape into place and made nipples for him.  Then his shoes with wrist and shin guards came next to finish up the dark brown colored fondant.  Next,  I colored black fondant and quickly made his features on his face and head.  The only thing left to do was his cape.  I dyed the remainder of the fondant red and draped it around him like the clip from the movie that I now had paused on the scene on the television, and cleaned up my workspace. He was looking decent but still not what I wanted.  As you can see by the above pictures, he was a bit lighter in color and just sort of drab.  I got the airbrush out and used brown food coloring to give him a tan. Much better!  He looked much more finished then and I was proud of it.

My son wanted to have arrows sticking out of it, now that he has fully embraced my idea of having the death scene be the cake, but I was running a bit low on time and figured he would be impaled enough by having 16 candles stuck out of him.   

By now, the camera was back up and running so I was able to get a picture of him with his 16th birthday cake.  I think he was happy and that made it all worth it!