Darth Vader Cakes

 So this was the first Darth Vader cake I made.  It was made for a 5 yr olds birthday party of a friend.  While I think the face turned out better on this one, the helmet had a basic flaw.  I let the fondant sit out a little too long so when I rolled it out it had tons of little cracks in it so it actually turned out looking like leather.  Which this is a good thing to know for future reference, but for the dark one's helmet I'd have preferred it to be smooth and shiny.  This is just stacks of pound cake with basic buttercream.  The top of the head was an 8 inch hemisphere cake pan which I carved two sides down so its more of an oval since no ones head is a true hemisphere.  I then cut out a recess in the front of the cake in the shape of the face plate.  I sculpted the face out of rice krispie treats and stuck it in the recess with buttercream as glue.  I then covered that in buttercream and chilled it.  Once that was set, I covered it with the black fondant.  I trimmed off the excess around the face then covered the helmet with the remaining fondant.  I use anything I can find to sculpt the details and in this case, it was mostly done with a wooden spoon and my hands. 

 This was my second attempt at Darth Vader and even though I had previous knowledge of what I was doing, I still made mistakes that made it come out different than I wanted.  Mainly, the face looks lumpy and this is because I didnt have the time or space to chill it properly before putting the fondant on.  Plus it was August, so it was friggen hot.  On the other hand, the helmet came out better because I learned from my previous mistake.  But this time I had bought the fondant pre made a la Duff Goldman's line of cake stuff.  So the amount of fondant I had wasnt quite enough so I had to roll it pretty thin to cover the helmet.  This created some unfortunate folds at the base, but all in all it looked pretty good.  Given that these were favor cakes and I didnt really get paid for them, I had to take some shortcuts.  Plus they were literally the first two cakes I'd done so perfection isnt really that realistic.