The Great Guardians Tower Cake Tutorial

Ever since my friends and I first saw the model for Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout, we joked that the exterior design looked like a poorly decorated cake.  Then, when we saw the green-and-yellow nighttime lighting, we joked that it looked like a pineapple.

The inspiration. Photo by Mrbellcaptain

This joke continued for a while, until we finally decided: yes, we had to make a cake based on Mission Breakout.  A pineapple cake.

Neither of us had done any kind of cake decorating before, besides slapping some frosting on a plain flat cake.

Breakout seemed like the perfect first foray into cake decoration, and thus, with a box of cake mix, my friend and I set out on Mission: Questionably Themed Dessert.

I thought it best to record this experiment, and therefore turned this into a tutorial of sorts.  This technique could technically also work to make a genuinely good Tower of Terror cake... but that would take a lot of practice and skill to not mess up.  Meanwhile, it was nigh impossible to ruin a GOTG cake.  Any mistake simply ended up making it more in line with the spirit of Mission Breakout's exterior.

I apologize in advance for the quality of some photos.  Holding a camera and taking photos while you're cooking is rather difficult.

Alright then, let's begin:

To start, we decided to make the main base/front of the building out of cake, while the tower part would be rice crispy for structural stability reasons.  To make it the proper size, we made our own rice crispies by melting butter and marshmallows and mixing them with Rice Krispy cereal.

Melting the marshmallows and butter

Fully melted marshmallows and butter

We then flattened the mix into a 13x9 inch pan to cool.  We made two 13x9 portions so that we'd have more than enough to work with, and also some to snack on while we made the rest of the cake.

Then we made the cake according to box directions.  Technically you could use any flavor you want for this, but we used pineapple because of the "it looks like a space pineapple!" joke we had.  Actually, I would recommend you NOT use pineapple flavor if you're making this as a serious cake; I'll review the flavor of the results at the end of this tutorial.  We also made the cake in a 13x9 pan.

The cake, once out of the pan and flipped over for cooling.

Once the cake was cooled and the rice crispy set, it was time to start constructing the building shape.  To start with the base, we cut the 13x9 cake in half to make two 6.5x9 pieces, frosted between the layers, and then stacked them on top of each other.

To start making the tower part, we cut one of the rice crispies into two 6.5x9 pieces, frosted between them, and stuck them together to make one double-thick 6.5x9 piece.  We then stood this up behind the base to form the tall back of the building.

We trimmed the sides of the cake to match the rice crispy width at this point too.

NOTE: If you are making this cake, do NOT actually stand up this piece unless you are ready to decorate and serve it IMMEDIATELY.  The reason is that the rice crispy is not truly solid, and will "sink" and lose height if left standing too long.  Even bracing it with skewers won't help much.  We mistakenly left it standing a long time before we got to the decoration/serving stage, which made it sink and become short and squat by the end.

We made the "T" shaped parts at the top of the building out of rice crispy and pinned them in with skewers.

We trimmed the front of the base to make it more in the proper proportion, and sculpted the dome, side tower, and the raised bit of the base out of rice crispy.  We also braced the back with more rice crispy at the base to help hold it up.

After taking these photos, we set aside the dome for later.  We knew its frosting would be a different color, so we set it aside to frost it separately and then place it later during decorating.

Once everything was sculpted, we covered it in a layer of frosting.  We decided to use spray color over white frosting for most of the color, but we couldn't find blue spray, so for that we had to actually use food dye to make blue frosting for those parts (including the dome).

Once frosted, we needed to base the thing out in orange.  Our orange spray didn't work, so I tried doing red and yellow on one side, which didn't quite work.

After a trip to the store finally got us a working orange spray, we based everything out in orange first. Then, following a reference photo, we added in reds and yellows where appropriate.

Base colors done, we put the blue frosted dome on its column.  Using black icing, I painted on the inexplicable black bar on the tower, and used some black to help define the "T" part of the building.

My friend did the Collector's logo in yellow icing, while I did blue icing for smaller pipes and spots on the dome pillar.  We used bendy straws for the larger pipes.  We could really tell how far the rice crispy was sagging by this point, but there was no turning back!

We sprayed some green on the side to represent the bright green sides the building has under the nighttime lights.

Finally, to represent the various satellites and spikes on the top, we propped up some metallic looking plasticware on the back of the building, so the ends stuck over the top from the front.

Here's the finished cake!

We left the back unfinished both for convenience and because the back of Mission Breakout is also unfinished: Disney didn't change it much from its Tower of Terror days!

Not gonna lie, my friend and I burst out laughing when we saw the finished product.  ESPECIALLY when we looked at the back, with the plasticware stuck in it.

Is it a terrible Guardians cake, or an awesome Guardians cake?  Perhaps both.  We'd send it to Cake Wrecks (we're both fans of it), but they only cover professionally done desserts, and we're about as amateur as you get.  At any rate this was really fun to make, and not too shabby for first time cake decorators!

As for the taste though...

It was NOT good.

The combination of super-sweet pineapple cake with the vanilla frosting and rice crispy made it overly sweet, to the point of tasting almost like over saturated fruit-flavored chewing gum.  If I were to make the cake over again, and take it seriously, I would definitely go for a more standard vanilla or chocolate cake.

At any rate, it was weirdly cathartic to get to eat that terribly done ride exterior.  My friend and I are Guardians of the Galaxy fans as well as Tower of Terror fans, and felt that the poor exterior design disserviced both IPs.  It makes for a great cake project though.

If any of you make your own Guardians or Tower cakes, please let me know!  I'd really want to see how they turn out!