To begin, we needed an actual light in order to get the dimensions for our project. Source 4's are around 2 feet tall, which we thought was somewhat unreasonable for a free standing cake, so we attached at PVC dowel to a piece of plywood to be the spine of our cake. The plywood was then covered in aluminum foil for sanitary reasons.
Next came the cakes. My estimate was that each cake would be 2-3 inches thick (WRONG!), requiring us to make 12 cakes. We used a basic yellow cake recipe, because we decided that strength was going to be much more important than flavor, though the cake did end up tasting good as well.
Here are our cakes. You may note that there were only 8- our plan was to cut the 9x13 cakes into smaller pieces for the thinner areas of the light. The next step was to flatten the tops of all our cakes, and start stacking. We carved it in sections of around 3 cakes at a time, and placed cardboard squares between every couple of layers for support. Between each layer we spread chocolate frosting- unfortunately not homemade.
We realized pretty quickly that the cakes were not actually 2 inches thick, and that we were not going to reach our goal of 2 feet. We also decided to keep the cake wider than the actual light because it was harder to carve than we had expected, and we didn't want to waste too much cake. Here is the cake will all of the layers.
The next step was to frost the cake to get it ready for fondant. Once again we used store bought frosting. Quick side note: not only did I have nothing to do last week, but I also had an unreasonable amount of meal points left, which is what allowed us to purchase all the ingredients we needed along with a Brita water pitcher and basically a lifetime supply filter replacements.
The frosting did not turn out that pretty, since it was only there as a glue for the fondant. We also removed the top two layers of cake since they were significantly smaller than the others and we thought it would be easier to put fondant on them separately.
Next came the biggest challenge- the fondant. We made our own with marshmallows because it is easier and cheaper than purchasing it. The recipe we used can be found here. We think our marshmallows were having some issues, because the fondant did not come out nearly as durable as it had for the valentines cake. The other major problem was that we needed to make it black. Doing a bit of research on the internet, I found out we either needed to buy black food coloring powder, prepared black fondant, or possibly add black icing to our fondant. Unfortunately, even after calling nearby bakeries, we were not able to find any of these ingredients and did not have time to order online.
Instead we decided to experiment with different mixtures of food coloring, all of which failed. We went with this greenish blue color because we thought we could possibly get the fondant darker on a large scale and then gave up partway through.
Here I am rolling out the fondant to place over the cake - note the color of my hands from all the food coloring experiment. The fondant was not nearly as sturdy as last time, and when we began to place it over the cake it started to fall apart, requiring us to do significant patching on the sides.
We then added on the top layers, also covered in fondant, and decorated the cake. The shutters were made from pieces of cardboard covered in aluminum foil and then fondant.
We even made a safety cable out of a necklace covered in fondant, and placed a C clamp on top for effect. (Had the cake actually been 2 feet tall then it would have gone all the way up to the clamp, but between the thinner cakes and the weight of the cakes and frosting we made it around 18 inches)
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