Have Your Wii Cake And Eat It Too

Posted October 12, 2007 by Kevin

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If there’s one thing I think gamers can all agree on, it’s that we love video game themed cakes. The problem with a lot of the cakes you see though, is that they aren’t actually edible. Cake designers use all sorts of weird things to get their frosting to stay in place, and to keep their cakes looking nice - as was the case in a recent Wired Magazine article that featured Martha Stewart and a Wii cake that looked great, but couldn’t be eaten.

Never fear though - Brian Walak, a reader over on Wired.com, has come up with a way to make a Wii cake that you can actually eat. He later ended up making an appearance on the Martha Stewart show to talk about how he did it. He didn’t write up any specific directions, but did offer up a few tips:

• Use Betty Crocker yellow cake mix. Don’t use chocolate, as it didn’t hold together as well for Walak.
• Don’t just stand a single piece of cake vertically. That’s the obvious and wrong choice. Instead, cut horizontal slabs of cake. Your first one should be larger, as that’s the “stand.” Leave this separate from the rest. The body will be of uniform thickness, as thick as a Wii. Then stack them up, putting French butter cream frosting and cardboard in between each layer.
• Cardboard is your friend. Alternate layers of cardboard with layers of cake as you stack up your Wii.
• Put it all in the fridge. For about a half an hour, or until the frosting hardens.
• Dowels. Okay, there’s still a lot of non-food items holding this all up, but you can eat around them. You’re going to want to push them all the way down the cake, through the cardboard. Sharpening them first will help. Have about two inches of the dowels sticking out from the bottom.
• Fondant. Make some grey-colored fondant for the base and white for the body. Cover the base in grey fondant, then put the body on, shoving the dowels through so it stands up. Now wrap the body in fondant as you would a present, keeping the seams in the back.
• Use a leftover slice of cake for the controller, covering it in the same white fondant. You can cut the buttons for the Wii and controller out of fondant, then use black and blue store-bought gel icing for the details.
• Do not refrigerate. The fondant will “sweat,” leaving the Wii looking slimy.

Hit the jump to see the first (and probably last) time we post a Martha Stewart video on this site, and watch Brian Walak talk about his Wii cake.