Thread: How to make your very own Lotro 5th anniversary cake(Tower of Sauron Birthday cake):)

1)Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.

2)Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, yellow food coloring, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add shortening, milk, and vanilla. Beat for 1 minute on medium speed. Scrape side of bowl with a spatula.

3)Add eggs to the mixture. Beat for 1 minute on medium speed. Scrape bowl again. Beat on high speed for 1 minute 30 seconds until well mixed.

4)Spoon cupcake batter into paper liners until 1/2 to 2/3 full.

5)Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

6)Cool 5 minutes in pans then remove and place on wire racks to cool completely.



7)Once cupcakes are completely cooled, use a fork to decorate the cupcakes with strawberry cream.




8)Add chocolate whip cream into the middle


9)Add this to the top of the tower



10)Tadaa...and it is done!

(The same instructions apply for the bottom chocolate cake base of the tower, except chocolate filling is used)

(By the way, the tower itself cannot be eaten as it is mainly made of cardboard, except for the chocolate base cake and the yellow cupcake above)

The tools you need:
1 sheet foamcore
1 sheet posterboard
Tissue paper
PVA glue
3 Cardboard paper towel tubes
Assorted toothpicks and bamboo skewers
Hot glue
Black & silver spray paint
Paintbrushes
Hobby Knife
Scissors
Hot Glue gun

Using the cardboard paper towel tubes as the core. The paper towel tubes were sleeved together to the approximate height that u want the tower to be (less the forky bit at the top). The spacing of the three tiers of the tower was marked out by eye.

Four discs were cut from foamcore - two large discs for the base of the tower and the top of the first tier and two medium discs for the second tier. Two flat strips were used to bulk out the top tier a little bit. All of the discs had a hole in the center for the cardboard tube to slip through.

Now, the smart way to make the discs would have been to determine the desired diameter of each level by taking measurements from a photo of the tower from the movie, calculating accurate proportions based on the size of your Bundt pan and the height of the cardboard tube, then using a compass to mark out each disc, thus ensuring that the discs were sized consistently and the center holes were, well... centered.

Scour your kitchen for bowls, cans, ramekins, bottle caps, and other circular objects that looked sorta like the right sizes, then traced around them with a pencil onto the foamcore. A spice jar turned out to be close to the right diameter for the center hole, and this was placed in the "center" of each circle, then traced.

The discs were cut out using a razor knife, and hot glued onto the center tube in almost precisely. Glued a few scrap strips of foamcore onto the tube lengthwise, just for additional support. A measurement was taken of the height of each tier, and strips of poster board were cut at something resembling this measurement, then glued into place to form the outer surface of the tower.

Tadaa!

To make the forky bit at the top, make a basic foamcore piece in the shape of the fork.
Ensure it is the right proportion size as your tower.
Attached it to a short segment of cardboard tube, then fleshed out with blue masking tape and posterboard side support pieces into a fair approximation of the tower top.

At this point, the tower is assembled, and a whole bunch of unnecessary flotsam was glued to it. Little triangular bits of foamcore served as crenellations at the top of each tier, little windowish blobs of hot glue were applied all over the surface, and more hot glue was used to draw in a shape that was supposed to look like either a massive front gate or a vending machine wearing a Coolie hat.

The entire thing was then painted with PVA glue and a layer of tissue paper was applied to every exposed surface. The idea was to add a bit of texture so it didn't look so much like plain posterboard.

Cut a shield-shape out of posterboard and glued it to the front of the forky thing. Then glue approximately a billion toothpicks, bamboo skewers, and larger bamboo skewers all over the tower, taking care to ensure that each one was lovingly trimmed to the correct length for its position on the tower. This was mostly accomplished using a wire-cutter and a lot of cursing. Refer to the photos for some idea of the positioning.

Use the toothpicks on the forky piece, thin skewers on the top tier, and thicker skewers on the bottom two tiers. These were just glued on vertically, with points protruding at the top of the tier, for the most part.

Some of the pointy things on the bottom tier were allowed to extend lower than the base of the tower

The tower is then base-coated with gloss black spray paint, and then dusted with flat black to accentuate the textures and contours of the tower

Use light dusting of silver spray paint to the fork at the top.

Let it dry for a couple of hours.

Place the tower above your chocolate cake and decorate it with the cupcakes.

And it is done! Woohoo!





Enjoy!! :-)

*group hug*

Peace and Love,
The Legion of Hope and Light
Http://TheLegionOfHopeAndLight.guildlaunch.com


(^_^)

Here are 3 delightful tutorials on baking cakes

Tutorial on baking cupcakes:


Tutorial on baking a sponge cake:


Tutorial on baking a chocolate cake:

The round cake is perhaps the simplest in terms of decorating as it only needs simple colored cream to decorate it.

For example:

Here is a good hands-on tutorial on how to bake a castle-shaped cake:



(The steps can be modified for smaller structures such as a house on top of a normal cylindrical cake)

There is a wonderful pastry invention called the "sugar paper" which is basically a photo-like image printed with edible ink onto edible paper

It depends on whether your local pastry offers such printing.

Thus, after baking your cake, just stick this above your cake.

And it's done!

It's that simple!

The sugar paper:

Man, that's a lot of work!

yep...

indeed...

There is a much easier method though...

The easiest would be just to purchase a regular round size cake and paste a sugar paper on top of it:

This is beyond amazing!

Very impressive. Thanks for sharing this .

This is great, thanks..+rep

You obviously put a lot of time into doing this. It's amazing!

How to bake your very own spring cake:



Happy Spring Everyone!