



What do you get when you combine 386 eggs, 118 cups of flour, 46 pounds of sugar, 57 pounds of butter, Rice Krispies and one legendary sci-fi bad guy? A delicious, life-sized Darth Vader cake.

Created by Amanda Oakleaf Cakes, a custom bakery in Winthrop, Mass., the 6 foot, 7 inch-tall cake replica of the iconic "Star Wars" figure made its debut Friday at the 15 th anniversary banquet of the 501 st Legion in Orlando.

The Legion's members are costume enthusiasts with a particular interest in "Star Wars," so every detail of the 500-pound creation had to be just right.

Amanda Oakleaf, who competed on the "Food Network Cake Challenge," said the Vader cake took months of planning and about two weeks of execution.

"It was really fun," she said Monday night.

Oakleaf and her crew made many of the components ahead of time in Boston and assembled the cake in Florida. Part of the head and lower legs were made of Rice Krispies, the arms and light saber were made of sugar, and the torso was made of yellow vanilla cake and with vanilla-flavored Italian meringue buttercream. It all went over an iron pipe frame.

Once assembled, the creation was covered in marshmallow fondant.

The bakery had previously made a life-sized storm trooper (another "Star Wars" figure, for those who aren't fans) so the actual assembly was not new. But the addition of Vader's cape was.

"We try to make all of our decorations edible out of fondant and sugar and everything is edible, so we had to engineer different new techniques to get the fondant … to hang five feet off the ground, so that was a challenge (and) we pulled it off," Oakleaf said.

The cake was placed behind a curtain for the banquet, and when it was unveiled "it was definitely well-received," she said.

It was also finished off by about 600 diners.

"We cut him up. All the cake got eaten," Oakleaf said, adding that "a couple of the legion members took his arms, his fists and his light saber, so those are just pure sugar, so they can just keep him, you know, they'll last. And then we did keep his head … kind of like a souvenir from the event."



The bakery and DK Publishing donated the cake for the event, but if a client wanted something like this made, the price tag would be about $10,000 to $12,000, she said.





"All of our cakes are custom, so whatever you can think of and whatever you have a budget for we'd be willing to make it," she said. "The life-sized cakes are the most expensive … because it takes so much of our time."