I’m sure I haven’t exhausted all of the possible “wow-factor” birthday presents I could possibly give Tony, but this year I decided that instead of one big (sports-related) gift, I’d go the whimsical route with a Doctor Who theme.  We’d just finished plugging through all of the seasons with Doctors Nine and Ten so it seemed fitting.  Waiting for him when he got home from work was a TARDIS-shaped birthday cake - my first attempt at making a specialty fondant cake.  I decided not to chance my maiden voyage with a 3D model.  Here’s how it went down:

I baked two carrot cakes in 9 x 13 pans, and stacked them with a layer of vegan cream cheese frosting in between.

I covered the entire cake with a thin layer of the same frosting.  I think Buddy the Cake Boss (LOVE that show!) calls it “dirty icing” the cake.  I dirty iced it! 

After dyeing the white fondant by hand, I rolled out a big enough piece to cover the entire cake with blue fondant and smoothed it out.

Using a picture of the TARDIS to guide me, I started cutting out some of the details for the cake with white and hand-dyed black fondant.  I wasn’t quite sure how to best make the light at the top, so I formed a ball of fondant into a light-ish shape, and added white fondant details to represent the beams of light. 

My lettering leaves a lot to be desired.  For the phone box sign at the top, I used letter presses and then filled in the lettering with stiff icing (not well, I might add - need to work on that!) and hand-scripted the phone box sign with an edible-ink marker.  I used a knife to mark out the panels on the TARDIS, and finished up with a few more fondant details on the windows and doors.  (The actual TARDIS has one more set of panels at the bottom, but I didn’t quite scale the cake properly to account for those.  Oops!)

I surrounded the cake with an electronic TARDIS, an Ood action figure, a sonic screwdriver (which doubles as a pen), an electronic Dalek, and a Doctor Who Encyclopedia (and as a little extra non-Who related present, a copy of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog on DVD).  I didn’t wrap anything because I thought they looked more fun in the packages all around the cake.  I think the effect worked - he was very pleasantly surprised when he came home from work and saw the kitchen counter covered with Doctor Who birthday treats.

After dinner, we opened the TARDIS.  It’s bigger on the inside.

Delicious, too!