My friend’s daughter wanted to celebrate her 7th birthday party at a planetarium. It was a fabulous idea and my kids had so much fun learning about stars and planets. Since she was planning for a large turn-out, I decided to surprise her with a solar system cake…yes, that’s right, a solar system cake…or rather cakes.
I knew it would be too much to do it to scale, so I just decided to make the planets out of cake. I made a total of 5-6 batches of cake batter and used spherical (ball) molds for the planets. I made a total of 4 spherical jello cakes using 4 halves of the ball pan sculpted into spheres, 2 spherical chocolate cakes using 4 halves of the ball pan (these were slightly larger than the 4 jello cakes), 1 spherical carrot cake using 2 halves of the ball pan, and 1 chocolate muffin shaped into a sphere for Mercury. I decided not to add Pluto since it was recently declared a dwarf planet.
Although Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune actually have planetary rings, I decided to just make a ring for Saturn since it is the most visible among the other planets. I piped white chocolate into a ring and sprinkled metallic sugar crystals to simulate the bits of ice and rock in real planetary rings. I used cream cheese frosting for the chocolate and carrot cakes and whipped cream frosting for the jello cakes. Since I did not want to go through the effort of baking a huge Sun, I decided to make a big popcorn ball instead. I’m glad it was a hit with the kids!
It’s a little too complicated to explain how I managed to levitate the cakes, so I won’t go into details. Suffice to say, I took the opportunity to elevate my cakes to a new level (as my aunt Martha would say).
