Work of the Genius

I have fond memories of playing Super Mario Bros at my cousin's house growing up, so coming across the "Work of the Genius" image became a complete no brainer of what I wanted to create for my first ever entry into this contest.

With that choosen, I immediately went to work cutting out all the fondant gears using various sizes of round cookie cutters, straws and a fondant knife. I needed these to hold their shape, so they dried over night.

I then baked a chocolate cake from cake mix, in a 6" square and a 10" dome. Disaster struck when my dome cake stuck to the pan, and no amount of filling or cake could mend it, and so I had to bake again. Thankfully second time was a charm.

Once these were cool, I coated it in a thin layer of chocolate frosting and allowed to set in the fridge. About an hour later, I took the square cake and covered it in vanilla fondant. I did the same with the dome. This was the base of my cake creation. To make sure it didn't collapse, I inserted in a few non edible supports. I then made my own royal icing and used that to "glue" down all the gears into place. Gears that were placed higher on the fondant square were helped with toothpicks until the royal icing hardend and then were removed.

I'm happy knowing that this cake only had non edible supports in the eye lens (to give it a further 3D effect) and in the turn key in the back - everything else is completely edible!

I then airbrushed everything on the square cake with gold airbrush paint. I'm still new with my airbrush, and found that I was creating round spots, but I think it adds to the effect of it being metal. I airbrushed the bottom in black. Using red fondant, I added in the "TNT" effect, along with some red wires (sorry no blue wires).

The feet were created from rice krispie squares covered in fondant and painted gold. Oddly enough this was the most challenging aspect, because the left foot kept falling off the base and smudging the paint. I just pushed the foot back to help solve this issue. On 3 pre-dried out fondant squares I drew on the "blue-print" images and stuck them onto a foam core board to complete the entire effect.

I really had a great time creating this. I'll admit that this is the first time that I felt a twinge of saddness cutting into a cake...but that was quickly forgotten once my hubby and myself started eatting it. Yum.