live laugh sasori

Part One: Planning

i had been thinking of making a sasori cake for a while because well, the core is vaguely in the shape of a cake and would therefore be really cool! i pitched the idea to my very close friend (who i'll just refer to as wanderlost) has a lot of more experience than me in baking, and they were extremely excited to help. i love it when people enable me

our original pitch was an ube flavored cake with the gray part of the core being icing, but unfortunately we ran into some problems: 1. the nearest place to get anything ube related was like...an hour away and we didn't really have time for all that. so we ended up using strawberry cake mix since it was easy to dye purple...it made for a really cool cross section! 2. my friend pitched fondant to cover the cake since it would give everything a more cartoonish look, and we would need it for the tendrils(?) roots(?) on the core

we planned to start the process of baking at the crack of dawn on sasori's bday, but we got a little late start since we slept in a little and went on an adventure beforehand...little did we know how long this would freaking take

wanderlost commentary section:

the adventure was walmart truly a magical experience :)

Part Two: The Easy Part

the first order of business was actually making the base for the cake. all we did was mix some cake mix, water, and shortening into a bowl, mixed it up, then dyed it purple. we poured it into springform pans to bake, which took a while since we only had two pants to use. it also didn't help that the suggested time to bake was like 20 minutes but it took much longer than that (not to mention we nearly had a crisis because my friend did not seal the pan all the way and there was a teeny weeny bit of leaking batter). overall this process took around two hours, and then we added the buttercream filling in between to stack them

next step was the chocolate ganache. we put a ton of dark chocolate chips and heavy whipping cream into a bowl, stirred, and let cool until it thickened to a peanut butter ish texture to spread over the cake. apparently our freezer sucks so the cooling part took a little longer than we expected, but whatever

here's what it looked like in the fridge afterwards. we put the cake in there to chill for a bit because it had been a few hours and we needed to eat lunch + take a sanity break

this was not the hardest part...

wanderlost commentary section:

I'm legally required to write here please send help she's holding a sasori figurine with a gun to my head

Part Three: Fondant (suffering)

my baker friend refused to use store bought fondant because MAKING IT IS FUN, supposedly

making the fondant was already kind of a messy hassle, but then there was DYING THE FONDANT. this made me question if all of it was worth it but it was for sasori so of course it was worth it <3 and honestly even though it took several hours to do all this it made me extremely proud of the finished product

the thing is you don't have to really use a lot of food dye to make it a certain color, but you have to knead it a lot. like a comical amount for the dye to spread, and even more so for it to be EVENLY spread. the first part we created from fondant was the core's white top. there was some excess we used to make the tendrils, which i kneaded the dye into. then there was the big ol gray part we needed to do, which was painful to dye but at least we came out with a cool marbled effect as you can see in the photos. it also took several tries to make the fondant LONG ENOUGH TO WRAP AROUND THE CAKE. sigh

when i was done dying the glob of fondant for the tendrils, wanderlost started molding them to put everywhere with the help of toothpicks. i was envisioning more of a jutting out look that was truer to sasori's core, but the fondant was a little soft, which meant it was difficult to make them stick out without them looking...floppy. in the end we went for the tendrils wrapping around the cake and around the base. instead i wasn't exactly sure how to feel about it at first, but it ended up looking really cool

if you're wondering why the tendrils are glossy: i had dyed the fondant to be a cool purple color, but it wasn't the exact shade i was going for. since we were kind of tight on time, i mixed a bit of pink dye in with some water and used that to cover the tendrils. it ended up being, as wanderlost says, "DISTURBINGLY WET" and i really liked the creepy feel it gave the cake!

the last finishing touch was the kanji on top. i was so tired by this point that i was scared it was gonna look bad, but HEY IT ALL WORKED OUT

wanderlost commentary section:

I went through textural hell. Fran owes me her life now for that is the only way she can make up for this problematically moist experience (even if I suggested it). It was fun though, whatever fran says about the process is lies and you should experience this too :)

Part Four: The Aftermath

and voila...we were done

a special thank you of course to my close friend who led the way on this project, but also thank you so much to my other housemates who pulled through and helped in a ton of ways and provided moral support, tbh i thought everyone i knew was gonna think i was super cringe for this idea but everyone was just like "OH COOL CAKE" and noticed how long my friend and i had been working away in the kitchen. ironically sasori's core was made with a lot of love, thought, and help from friends

we made this cake big enough to share with a lot of people :) and of course i had to get a ton of photos with my sasori figures heehee. we actually waited a whole day to eat the cake because i have attachment issues and wanted to keep it around for like as long as possible, but a cake is only as good as it tastes so we had to eat it

(we had to take the tendrils out because of the toothpicks we used to stick em in)

wanderlost commentary section:

I'm so glad I got to stab this cake. This is for Sakura, who I think would absolutely cook if given a massive ass rail gun. The creators of Naruto are cowards they can't handle this brilliance. Fran can hate me for this all she wants but I'm right, as always. You know what would have made that fight more spectacular? Letting Sakura fight Sasori with a big ass gun. Just let her have this she has so little-

happy birthday to my favoritest fictional character :)