World of WarCrafts: Let them eat cake

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

There's nothing sweeter than finding a way to fold one passion into another. Maybe that's why we love Warcraft cakes so much? Of course, it could be as simple as the intersection of good taste and tastes good. Yeah, that's it.

This week, World of WarCrafts brings you a virtual patisserie of WoW delectables. First up, we visit with another winner from Blizzard's Holiday Dessert Contest. Next, we'll show you how they celebrate weddings in Mulgore (hint: it's all cake, baby). Finally, brace yourselves, because we bring you the ultimate gingerbread house: Snaxxramas.

Kharti from <Utility> of US Dragonmaw-H is so crazy for WoW cakes (more than just the award-winning Frostmourne extravaganza introducing this post) that we needed to create a photo gallery to hold all the photos. And fortunately for us (because peeking behind the scenes at what goes on in the kitchen is the yummiest part), Kharti loves to talk cakes. Although she's a full-time IT professional in the real world, she also holds a degree in patisserie and baking and bakes as often as possible for her friends and family.

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Everything about Kharti's Frostmourne cake was made completely from scratch and is completely edible -- not even any internal support or wires -- over two sugar-crazed days, with the assistance of Kharti's guildmate and boyfriend, Aeon. "Needless to say, our apartment was chaos for those two days as I scrambled to finish the cake a week before the submission date so we could bring it to a party that our guild was having that weekend," Kharti remembers. "On a side note, we have a really cool raiding guild that is based largely out of Portland, Oregon. We get together regularly for guild parties that are usually pretty chill but have gotten pretty wild on occasion. Our shindigs are so well known in the guild that we regularly have members attend from out of state (Washington, Wisconsin , California and Arizona), and our planned summer gathering may be attended by several Canadian guildies and even one from Venezuela!"

So this cake definitely had a destiny to fulfill, in more ways than one. Fueling the effort were some 15 pounds of sugar, 5 dozen egg whites, 4 pounds of butter, 2.5 pounds of shortening, 3.75 pounds of milk, 3.75 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of powdered sugar and various other small ingredients. "We underestimated the amount of materials we needed and had to make several return trips to the store," Kharti confesses. "The end result was a cake that weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 pounds, was 5 inches tall, 12 inches wide, 16 inches long and had decorations that broke the 14-inch mark. It took two people to carry, barely fit in the car -- and when the base was cooling, we had to take everything out of the refrigerator plus we had to move the refrigerator just to fit it in."

The effort proved equal to the task. "After feeding 15 guildies, filling several take-home boxes and supplying the bar staff with their weekly sugar dose, we were barely able to consume half of the cake," Kharti reports. "Needless to say, we also made very good friends with the bar staff and their families!"

Assembling the masterpiece

The cake was a three-layer white cake with orange flavor, with a butter cream topping featuring a vanilla-mint mix. The terrain and cave was entirely hand-carved. Rocks were created from rock sugar dyed greenish-blue. "This was created by taking sugar up to 298 degrees and then stirring royal icing into the sugar, returning it to heat to let it soufflé and then pouring it out in one piece for cooling," Kharti explains. "Broken up -- Aeon used a hammer when he thought I wasn't looking! It was sanitized, though -- and placed around the cake, it made a really nice visual texture to break up the smoothness of the rest of the cake." Sprinkles of white and green sugar around the cave contributed to the icy effect.

Frostmourne and Icecrown Citadel itself are made from pastillage (like Necco wafers). "I made the dough and rolled it out so I could cut out the shapes for the Icecrown Citadel and Frostmourne that Aeon had drawn out for me earlier," Kharti says. "They are very fragile, both drying and dried, so I made them a bit thicker than normal so that I wouldn't chance breaking them and having to do it all over again (as it takes two days for it all to dry). Once they dried, we sanded them down. I had Aeon color the 15 pieces that made up the Citadel with a few colors of pixie dust. It was his first experience with the stuff, and there was a fair amount of griping and ranting going on as he discovered how big a pain it can be and how much of a mess it can make. The cake board was covered with royal icing, a little of which was used to add all the shape and highlights to Frostmourne, which I dusted with pixie dust after it dried. Making Frostmourne was my favorite part out of the entire project, kind of my pride and joy. Finally, the Citadel was glued together with royal icing, using little pieces of pastillage as support to give it the 3D look."

The baking team finished the entire project with a fine dusting of powdered sugar. And voila! Icecrown lives (until <Utility> got hold of it, anyway).

WoW nerd cake

Kharti's cake gallery also includes a few shots of a cake she created for a surprise nerd/WoW-theme birthday party for their guild's healing officer. The chocolate fudge cake cake featured ganache icing with three different colors of modeling chocolate. "I decorated the cake to look like a nerd's shirt and pants," she explains, "then tied the Warcraft theme into the cake by putting small Horde logos on the suspenders and bow tie on the top." We'd say she tied this project up to perfection!

Mulgore wedding cake

Next in the cake lineup: the wedding cake of Shootmeplz and Sari of US Hakkar-H. "Image taken in Mulgore, with the cake designed to sort of flow with the image semi-seamlessly," notes Shootmeplz. Congratulations to the happy couple!

Snaxxramas

Some people don't create mere gingerbread houses; they go straight for Snaxxramas. We're betting creators Shevaun and Orvel of US Twisting Nether-H had a lot of fun putting this together. It looks like they've thrown out some sort of strange frosting snare to catch incoming Alliance players ... We bet being ported directly to the summoning stone inside wouldn't be such a bad deal in this instance!