How to make a robot birthday cake

One of my sweet customers, Becky, made the most wonderful robot birthday cake for her son David’s birthday! When she sent me a picture I wrote back right away to ask how she created it. I had to know: what are those sparkly metallic panels made of?!

Becky was so kind and helpful in sending the step-by-step details of how she made David’s cake that I’ll let her take it away from here! Here’s what she told me…

To give credit where’s it’s due, I adapted the cake from the What’s New Cupcake book. I wanted the cake to be bigger and a little friendlier looking, plus I couldn’t find some of the candies they mentioned, so here’s what I did. : )

I used silver foil cupcake liners and iced the cupcakes in grey frosting. Unfortunately, my “grey” frosting looked lavender, so I used Wilton’s spray food coloring in silver to make it look more metallic. The graham crackers are first iced, then dipped in silver sugar for the sparkle.

You’ll want to spray the whole robot (cupcakes and graham crackers) with the silver food color spray just before adding the candy. Then, start adding the details!

The legs and arms are “attached” by thin breadsticks. The antenna, hand joints, and “ears” are pretzel sticks. The red on the antennaes are dot candies, the yellow on the “ears” are mini M&Ms, and the “hands” are life saver gummies. There are also life saver gummies where the “ears” connect to the head. There is one more life saver gummy as the green dial on the chest – I rolled it out with a rolling pin and used black icing to make hash marks (also used to make the vent on the middle of the chest).

The “joints” are vanilla wafers.

All of the blue parts (eyes, joints, etc) are M&M candies – the eyes are larger ones and the joints are mini ones. The brown, orange, green, and yellow accents are all mini M&Ms.

The mouth and the red strip on his chest are both cut out of sour strips candy. There is also a white Chicklet on his chest.

The rollers on his feet are red M&Ms.

The great thing about this cake is you really can decorate however you want (and with whatever candy you have on hand). We used leftover candy from the cake for our “build a robot” rice krispie treats, so luckily not much candy was left hanging around my house! This cake was so much fun to make, and David is still talking about his robot party!