How to Make a Wall-E Birthday Cake

Option 1) Hire a professional to make one that looks like this:

or this amazing airbrushed one. wow!

Option 2) Buy one from the bakery that looks like this:


Option 3) Buy the Wilton cake pan on Amazon for $15 and just bake and frost it like this:


Option 4) Scour Google Images for ideas and follow someone else's homemade cake design that looks like this: (Thanks Hildebrand Family, I tried to leave a comment on your guestbook but couldn't figure it out.)


So here's how I did it. Using the above cake photo and image from the movie:



BAKE:
*2 cake batches: 1-square, 1-round and 1 9x13. I didn't use all of both batches, but having extra for mistakes was nice. Let cool completely!



PREPARE FROSTING/ICING:
*buy/borrow a box of Wilton gel icing colors (Walmart sells it) and mix two batches of buttercream icing and divide them into sections to be colored: (read here if you've never done cake decorating. I'm a total beginner so it was good to skim through and remember tips I'd been shown before)
[**Note: I thought this icing tasted yucky. I prefer all-butter buttercream frosting (like the one on the back of the box that I usually use). But that's just me. I'm not a shortening gal. In this case it was probably a good thing because I ate less of the cake that I would've otherwise!!

*For the record, I prefer the word "frosting" over "icing", but Wilton uses icing to describe what I call frosting. I'm with the writer of this article. Frosting is thick. Icing is thin. ]

golden yellow: body and arms
light grey: eyes and some details
dark grey: feet, hands, neck, "eyeballs", outlining around eyes
black: outline around "eyeballs", tread squiggles, speaker lines, detailing, lettering
white: arms stripes, E in red circle
red: red "E" circle
green: solar charge level (yellow works fine too if you don't want to mix/buy this one)

*I used black, golden yellow, red, and (would have used) kelly green to mix the above colors (I bought some tubes of black and red and green at the last minute because I wasn't certain how the mixed colors would work but it turned out fine and I only used the green tube for the "solar charge level".) To get the dark grey I mixed in a couple shakes of baking cocoa to darken it up a bit before tinting it with black (a tip from the Wilton site: use chocolate frosting).

*At the end I ended up with extra yellow icing and barely enough dark grey. So here's my recommended/revised proportions:
1st batch: 1/2 yellow and 1/2 dark grey
2nd batch: 1/3 light grey, 1/3 black, remainder blob into custard dishes for white, red, green(optional) Hopefully these proportions work for you!

*I used a simple cake decorating kit (tips and a bag) that I'd bought years ago and never opened. I also used sandwich ziploc bags with the corner snipped off for the tiny amounts of icing (red, white).

SHAPING:
*cut the cakes (you can use all the same kind, I mixed the two because that's what I had on hand) into body, "feet", eyes/head, neck, arms, hands. This took some experimenting and eyeballing. I used the largest cutting board we have and placed foil over it. Something bigger would've given me more room for his neck/head area.



*The eyes/head were a bit tricky. I used the round cake to help with the shaping, but you could do the same with any cake shape. Cut a template if you want to get it perfect. For all the body parts that were "symmetrical" I stacked the pieces on top "right sides together" (kind of like cutting fabric) so I'd end up with both sides mostly the same.

* Note: the arms are two pieces each: a little rectangle base for the longer arm piece to hang over the edge and rest on. For the neck I rounded the corners by slicing them off lengthwise

*Arrange cakes on your board until it looks right. : )


FROSTING:
*remove the arranged parts to the side and frost the YELLOW square first (leaving the top 1/4 of his body for grey) and then adding his 2 arm pieces (no hands yet) and frosting those yellow as well. My cakes were pretty crumby (ha ha) so it took some tricky spreading skills to get things smooth and crumb free. I added tiny bits of milk to get a smoother spreading consistency as my icing had dried a little. Be careful not to get it too runny! Tiny drops of milk go a long way.

*DARK GREY: frost feet and hands on a separate surface and then place on cake (unless you can figure out a better way). Frost the top of the body and the neck.

*LIGHT GREY: frost inside corners of eyes then scoot in place to frost the rest.



DETAILS:
*This is the fun part now that the tedious base coat is down. : ) Be creative and do whatever looks good. I was a little short on time at this point so sadly I had to rush the fun part. Otherwise I would've remembered to add the red "record" button by the speaker, the dot between the red E and the black letters, and curve the letters rather than angle them. Obviously I changed the name a bit a la the professional cake at the beginning of this post.

I used a medium(?) straight tip for the black in a regular pastry bag since there was a lot of it and just a tiny snip from baggie corners for the white, red and dark grey. These were little blobs of a few tablespoon amounts of color in the baggie. More like a 1/4c. for the dark grey.

For the eyeballs I squeezed them on from the bag and smoothed out a bit before outlining.



"TADAH!" --Wall-E (my favorite line!)

Whew! Now, wasn't that fun?! There's many ways to improve upon this I'm sure. Good luck! I'm glad I'm not a professional otherwise I would be worried it'd show up on Cake Wrecks and get burned! I was seriously thinking about her blog the whole time I was doing this. I even looked up her Wall-E posts to see what she had to say about the bakery version.

Busted

After 16 years of driving it finally happened. I got a speeding ticket. : ( I was coming back from Medford late last night after an afternoon of kid-free errands (which included a peaceful solo dinner reading a book while eating a bison burger at a new-to-me local/organic sandwich shop). I was enjoying some tunes on my ipod and was coming down I-5 just after Hilt before the ag inspection station. This is the longest straight a way of the trip and the elevation descends rapidly. It's near impossible to keep the car under 80 just coasting. So of course that's where the California Highway Patrol officer is sitting with his radar gun on a very dark starlit night and he clocked me at over 80 and had his lights on before I new what hit me. Curses.

My contentment was shattered. As I sat on the shoulder with blaring lights in my eyes hoping without hope that I'd get off with a warning I repentantly felt I'd got what was coming to me. I was just mad that it was coming down a hill like that and makes it seem like I'm always going 20 miles over the speed limit when I usually lock in the cruise control around 70.

So the officer comes back with the ticket, explains that I have to go to court and I'll be explained my options with the possibility of going to traffic school to keep it off my record if this is a first offense. And so I creep the remaining 15 miles down I-5 with my tail tucked between my legs, barely topping 60, mentally bidding farewell to the few hundred bucks I have stashed for a digital SLR. sniff.

I'm one of those people that in the moment of an intense situation I'm very clear headed and detached emotionally. But after it's all over I fall apart and the whole world comes crashing down. So by the time I got home all I felt like doing was escaping to the computer and catching up with blogs til I was tired enough to fall asleep. But I was feeling too glum to leave comments. Sorry blogging friends! If you're still even reading my neglected blog.

But it's a sunny Saturday so I'll do my best to think about gardening and spring despite the thick frost on the ground and icey permafrost on the north side of the house. Or maybe I'll just stay on the computer all day finishing the posts I started weeks ago. Hmmm. At least I did some yoga for the first time today in almost a year. I'm not very good. Very beginning stage of watching something on TV and lacking straps and bricks. Plus I have a cold so it's hard to do the breathing. But I love that toned and stretched out rubber band feeling afterwards. I think I need to start out with less time. I was dead after a mediocre hour of it while also craning my neck to see how some of the less familiar poses were done. Any tips?

Henry Turns Three!

We celebrated Henry's third birthday yesterday. I made him a Wall-E cake and we played Pin the Plant on Eve and he had fun opening his gifts: Toy Story and Wall-E stickers and books, constructions set, lincoln logs, a genuine Slinky Dog and a t-ball set (from Grandma).








That's the simple story. The backstory is Matt was out of town most of the week and our computers were both at the service dept getting fixed which required a couple 2 hour roundtrips to Medford, one with all three kids in the late afternoon (argh!). We had a series of late naps and late bedtimes so by the time Thursday afternoon rolled around, I was still figuring out how to assemble and frost the cake and everything was behind schedule, was being a Nazi-mommy having been "on-duty" three days straight, and was still feeling bad for not being more on the ball and having a playgroup party for him. Matt grilled some dinner while my perfectionist self obsessed over the cake and I think the party finally started around 7:30, not too bad except for the state of everyone, except Henry. He was good to go and just wanted to open presents. So that was that craziness. Between Christmas gifts and birthday presents, Henry finally has a modest collection of real boy toys. :)







I didn't think the frosting tasted that great, but apparently the kids did! I'm planning on posting about making the Wall-E cake, along with about 5 other drafts, ha hah.

Oh, and the best surprise of the week was Henry deciding to potty train himself. We've been practicing on and off for the last couple months with good pee success but not so much with poop. So I told him on his birthday "no more diapers" and that very afternoon he sat on the toilet to poop all by himself and has been so independent since. Yay from Henry! He's also been doing well with his speech therapy, but more on that later.

First Day of Preschool

Today was Evalyn's first day of preschool. She was so excited. We stopped in last week for her to look around and be familiar with things. Since we were starting in the middle of the year, we wanted to make extra sure things were all ready for her. Last night she had a hard time falling asleep. That made the morning a little rough so things weren't quite as smooth as I was hoping. (She didn't get to eat her blueberry pancakes until later that day.) But we took her picture, packed her little lunch and Daddy dropped her off. I'm sure if I'd gone I would've lingered and shed a small tear at the milestone. As it was, I could only smile at how fast Henry and Linnea descended on her unguarded My Little Ponies and princess castle. That is, after Henry settled down from the injustice of not getting to go with his big sister. Getting to help me cook the pancakes and not having to share the stool did the trick pretty quick.

I kept watching the clock, hoping she was fine and not sulky or left out or uncertain. I was there at noon on the dot to pick her up. When I walked in, she was sitting with the twin boys from her soccer team and just glanced at me with nary a smile. She was either too tired to make the effort or (more likely!) annoyed that I was there and the fun was coming to an end. I was expecting a bouncing little girl running to my arms saying "I'm so happy to see you Mommy! I missed you!" Not my little socialite! The teachers/helpers said she did fine and had a good time.

Later when we were home I asked her what she liked best. "Crafts." What else? "Playing in the toy stand." (The corner of the classroom has this fun platform house thing that she didn't want to leave when we were there on our walk through.) What else? "Circle Time!" with a grin. Later on in the day she mentioned they practiced writing the letter M and the number 0.

She's only going two days a week for now, which is just about right I think. She is very excited about starting school in the fall as well. Our town has 3 grade schools. They're divided by K-2, 3-4, 5-8, and then high school. (I think these can also shift year to year depending on needs.) Evalyn knows where they all are because a few times my friend Sheila watched E during the day for me and she'd go with for the school pick ups. The 5yo was at one school, the 8yo the next one, and the 11yo at the middle school. It's a bit different than schools I went to where it was K-6 and then 7-8. It seems to work well for this area, though a little traffic-ey for pickups and drop-offs perhaps.

Getting a good picture of a very excited somewhat overtired 4yo first thing in the morning was pretty futile. If some child hadn't left fingerprints on the lens, the top one would've been a bit better. She was very excited about taking her lunch with her though!