Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Stella's Ahsoka Tano cake

My friend Jim has passed on his love of Star Wars to his daughters, and they finished watching The Clone Wars series together during the pandemic. The girls have become huge fans of Ahsoka Tano, who features prominently in the series and was Anakin Skywalker's Padawan. Jim's daughter Stella requested an Ahsoka Tano cake for her birthday and I pondered how I could make that happen with my limited artistic skills. The concept I came up with was to model Ahsoka's distinctive horn-like montrals, which are blue and white striped. 
 
First, I baked a two-layer chocolate cake that I filled and frosted with chocolate mousseline. Then I sculpted the basic shape of the montrals out of Rice Krispies treats and covered them with fondant. This is my first time using cereal treats in cake decorating, and it was more challenging that I had anticipated. I wanted the montrals to cover the entire top of the cake and I badly misjudged how heavy the fondant-covered treats would be. The mousseline covering the cake was soft and in retrospect I wish I had used American buttercream instead, because it's considerably more study. I struggled to arrange the montrals on top, made a mess of the buttercream underneath, and had to support the portions that hung over the edges of the cake with bamboo cocktail forks to keep the whole thing from collapsing.
Everything about the montrals turned out pretty wonky. They were asymmetrical; the bumpy texture of the cereal was visible through the fondant (even though I had tried to smooth out the surface with a coating of mousseline before adding the fondant); I had to patch together a few pieces of fondant to cover all of the montrals and the seams were conspicuous; and the blue color was a fairly washed out because I was using natural food coloring. I was not thrilled with the way the cake looked, but it tasted great and Ahsoka Tano concept was recognizable. Stella was delighted with it, so I consider the cake a success!

Recipes: "Old-Fashioned Chocolate Layer Cake with Mocha Milk Chocolate Frosting" by Alice Medrich, from Absolutely Chocolate: Irresistible Excuses to Indulge; recipe available here at Fine Cooking; "Mousseline Buttercream (Chocolate Variation)," and "Classic Rolled Fondant" from The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Previous Birthday Cakes for Stella:

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