Believe it or not, that’s a cake! This amazing TARDIS cake was made by Barbara Jo from Do It Myself!
The only things that aren’t edible are the lighting system and two mirrors inside the TARDIS.
Barbara Jo chose to go with the new Tardis interior because, as it is both more organic and more interestingly illuminated than any previous Tardis interior, she thought it would be the most visually effective.
The details on this cake are amazing.
To make the interior Barbara Jo started with a gum paste floor with cutouts to let the light through from all the white LEDs embedded in the base. In order to enhance the illusion of interior space and elevate the bottom of the central console sufficiently to make it easily visible through the windows, she gave the floor a serpentine curve, supported by gum paste struts. Then she stuck a layer of rice paper to the top of the gum paste floor and painted it dark grey with food coloring. On top of this she piped grey royal icing expanded steel. To give it a nice sheen, she went over it with some silver luster dust.
Thanks to the mirrors, Barbara Jo only needed to make one eighth of the control console. The console structure is gum paste and sheet gelatin, assembled around blue, green, and aqua LEDs and attached to the mirrors with clear piping gel. Then she stuck on a myriad of gum paste and royal icing levers, dials, cables, monitors, etc. At times the mirrors made things a little difficult because it was sometimes hard to remember which was the real console and which was the reflection. Liberal use of silver, bronze, and gold luster dust made everything nice and shiny.
The exterior required fifty-two separate pieces of gum paste – two for the panels on each of the four sides plus one inward-facing panel for the side that looked into the interior and three to back the windows on the other three sides, six for each of the four "Police Box" signs (some of which were quite tedious, as Barbara Jo had to painstakingly cut out the words to let the light through), and sixteen for the roof. Later she needed an additional seventy-two pieces of gum paste for the window frames and mullions. She went with a grey-blue marbled effect because she thought it wo
uld look more convincing and more interesting than a uniform color field.
Three days before the party Barbara Jo baked the cakes. She decided to go with a banana cake with chocolate buttercream icing because, to quote the Doctor, "You should always bring a banana to a party. Bananas are good." She needed a total of eight two inch tall, ten inch square cakes. Of the eight cakes, seven of them were cut in half on the diagonal and stacked in the body of the Tardis. The last cake was reserved for the square top section.
With the cakes in place, she covered them with a layer of fondant, to prevent the gum paste exterior pieces from coming into contact with the buttercream, which would moisten, soften, and weaken the gum paste. Then she was able to install the last two side pieces and their respective "Police Box" signs.
Barbara Jo put the top section together separately, carving the slanted roof, covering it with fondant, and then assembling the gum paste pieces around it with royal icing. She left a hole through the middle, so that she could run blinking LEDs through it for the light on top. Once the top section was in place, her TARDIS really started to look like a complete piece, but it still needed a lot a detail work.
She used fondant rather than gum paste to cover the base and for the trim on the corners and in the center of each side panel because some of them needed to be relatively thick, which is easier to accomplish with fondant. She did use gum paste, however, for the thin strips of molding around the perimeter of each "Police Box" sign.
To make the little light on top, Barbara Jo wrapped rice paper around gum paste circles, then put panels of sheet gelatin on top of that, followed by gum paste trim and royal icing mullions. The curved top is gum paste dried over Styrofoam balls.
More details on this amazing TARDIS cake can be found on Barbara Jo's website.
