X-Box 360

I received a call from a friend and neighbor asking if I could do a cake for the weekend coming up. It was already Tuesday, but I had already planned on taking Friday off to go see Transformers 3 with my son, so I figured I could whip up a cake for Saturday. She said that the daughter of her mother's friend (follow that one?) made a cake that looked like an X-Box 360, but when she say the preview picture of the finished cake, she just couldn't give it to him. I told her I could do one for her. She brought over pictures as examples of what she wanted and a picture of the cake that was not to see the light of day. She was right, it looked really bad. Here is the picture:

The picture isn't the best quality because it is a scanned copy of a printed version of the picture. That's ok, the cake isn't of very good quality either. Can you imagine someone charging $100 for that? I assured her that I could do one that would make her proud to give it to him. She wanted the black X-Box 360, which I informed her could be a problem. Too much dye could really wreck the flavor of a cake. The agreed that the white would be ok, but my wife convinced me to at least try the black to see if it was bad before giving up on it. I decided I would make chocolate marshmallow fondant and then dye that to see if I could get black a little easier. It worked out very well. The fondant tasted fine. They wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate icing underneath. I had happened to make a couple of cakes earlier in the week to let a bride and groom try them for a groom's cake I plan to do later in the summer. I tried a new chocolate cake recipe that turned out excellent. The chocolate icing is decadent, because it is made with butter, cream, and lots of cocoa. Evil stuff.
I hopped on-line and found a picture of the newer X-Box and controller, since she wanted the controller as well. I started the cake in the early afternoon on Friday and worked through the evening. I did the finishing touches the next morning. Some of the details don't show up since they are carved into the black face of the cake. They're invisible unless you're in person and the light is hitting it just so. I did have to mix up a little butter cream icing to use as "glue" for some of the components and for the green power indicator. I added the vent holes and other parts that I could see in the pictures of the real unit I found. I should have probably walked down the street and looked at the real unit for more detail, but I figured the pictures were enough.

The cake was a hit at the party. The birthday boy loved it. A few of the more amusing moments are when people would try to push it out of the way to set something down because they thought it was a real unit, only to be shocked when they really looked at it and realized it wasn't a real unit. One of the kids tried to grab the controller because he wanted to go play the real X-Box and nobody would let him. When his fingers sunk into the icing, he figured out real quick that it wasn't real. I wouldn't say it was totally life-like, but it was fairly close. Close enough to fool people if they weren't paying close attention. Success.
This one wasn't without its challenges though. I realized that adding that much dye to the marshmallow fondant dried it out considerably. I would have thought the opposite. When I was kneading the fondant, I kept adding more and more water to make it more pliable and less likely to crack. I finally got it rolled out nice and smooth and thought that it was soft enough to put on the cake. It was still a little dry, so there were some small cracks at the corners after it was put on the cake. Nothing catastrophic, but it still bothered me. She I did the controller, I tried adding a little shortening to the mix, and that did the trick. The fondant was much easier to work with then. I'll remember that for the future. I had some white fondant left over from the bride and groom earlier in the week that I tinted to make everything that wasn't black. Luckily, I kept the extra fondant, because it came in handy later in the week for this one.