DARTH VADER CAKE
A fond childhood memory shared by many of my friends was that around 1980 and 1981, we all had Darth Vader cakes from the Workman’s IGA bakery. I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “what the hell is a Darth Vader cake?” Well, back in the days before all this Ace of Cakes bullshit or this phenomenon of screen printed photos on cakes, the good folks at the Wilton Cake Pan Company made cake pans shaped like popular characters: Bert & Ernie, Superman, Big Bird, R2-D2, and Darth Motherfucking Vader. Back in those days, Darth Vader was one bad mofo - he had never been a cute little kid, an annoying lovestruck teen, or the old woman who was revealed under the helmet in Return of the Jedi. He was a badass who could choke you to death from light years away just by pinching his fingers together.
Recently, several of my friends and I had been talking about how great it would be to have an old school Chapmanville birthday party in the backroom of the Chapmanville Giovannis with a bunch of pizzas, Snyders potato chips, and a Darth Vader cake. During this discussion, I recalled that approximately ten years ago, I was looking around in the crawl space above the bakery at the IGA and saw said Darth Vader cake pan. I declared that I would make it my mission to find this pan. A few months passed by and while I was at home on July 3, 2009, I decided that this would be the day that I found Lord Vader.
I spent about an hour digging around up there in the heat, unearthing box of cake pans after box of cake pans, but to no avail. I found R2-D2 within about fifteen or twenty minutes and after a while I felt that this would have to suffice, but I percerviered. Eventually, I unearthed Lord Vader. He was not in a box with other cakes, rather he was underneath some large and heavy metal thing, which I could not identify.
This is the year that all my friends get a Darth Vader cake for their birthdays. The first up was Roger. His birthday was on July 4, but we held off on the Vader cake for a week. My trusty sidekick (also an excellent baker) was originally going to bake this cake, but she had friends in town that weekend and could not do it. She did, however, make some delicious macaroni and cheese and host the party. It was left to me to bake the cake. The cake (chocolate, of course) itself was very tasty, however, I am not much of a decorator (as you can see from the photographs).
