Planning: St Basil's Cathedral

Cakebook 2014: St Basil's Cathedral

• Planning: St Basil's Cathedral
• Experiments: St Basil's Cathedral
• Building: St Basil's Cathedral
• On the day: St Basil's Cathedral & Tea & Cake Planet (Cakebook 2014) 

Planning St Basil's Cathedral

Mr Lisa was very concerned.  He took on the burden of "Engineer" as he always does, even without volunteering.  His role was to find all of the tricky bits in the original building and work out how to make them work (stand upright without any assistance: cardboard boxes, batons, skewers) using the medium of cake - he's a purist and passionate about it too. If you're building a building out of cake it should be entirely made from cake, none of this cheating with boxes covered in icing...He likes the challenge, and by removing the amount of cake essentially removes the challenge for him.  And even though we have serious discussions about how busy we both are, we actually really enjoy the planning, experimentation and the actual building process.

Plans, blueprints, other versions (in cake)

And we had a few challenges to deal with:

• How are we going to do those towers around the outside, all 8 of them?
• How are we going to do those towers around the outside AND transport it 8 miles without any structural damage?
• How are we going to do the massive tower/spire in the middle?
• How are we going to do the massive tower/spire in the middle AND transport it 8 miles without any structural damage?
• How are we going to do those onion shaped domes on each tower?
• How tall are we planning to make this?
• How are we going to find the time to do all of this?

My thoughts were taken up with ideas about what shortcuts and decorations I'd like to try, and googline for "St Basil's Catherdal cake" - there are quite a few results, which was good, because it told me that it was possible!


I wanted to get started on experiments, on practicing piping royal icing into pretty patterns, on baking cakes (to freeze) on trying to create a lightweight dome rather than deciding how big to make the beast.

We found "St Basil's Cathedral" floorplan was very useful too - helping us to work out the shapes and size.  Mr Lisa was able to do some photocopying/enlarging and selotape it together to produce our blueprint (actual size floor and side views).

And then I could experiment!!