Wilber Cake

Wilber Cake with Goat Cheese Frosting

I wanted to make a wilber cake for GIMP's 10th birthday. When I began the project, thought that I had two round 9 inch cake pans and would need them both. As somewhat typical for the artist, I learned in the middle of the project two things: my cake pans were only 8 inches and that I only needed one of them.

bake the cake

I used a standard yellow cake recipe from the family cookbook; you can use whatever kind of cake that you want, as long as it is the kind that can be cooked in a round cake pan and decorated. For instance, angelfood cake might not work, pineapple upside down cake either.

cut guide

Shown is roughly where the pieces came from in the cake. I made the xcf so that it can be rotated and printed on letter sized paper for a useful guide.

My first idea was to cut out eyes as well, but when I really looked at the cake, the pop eyes would have been comical and not make a cake that is like Wilber. The eyes make a good template to outline where the eye colored frosting should go.

piece layout

Put the pieces together as shown here. I forgot to put frosting in between the pieces. I am not certain how this would have changed my cake.

wilber without much GIMP

Here is how the Wilber cake appears without the mess I made of it with GIMP ;)

I used electricity only to bake the cake and light the room. The rest was done with a butter knife and elbow grease. You do not need to get a bunch of fancy equipment to make a cake, although the cut diagram would be useful for people with all sorts of equipment available to them.

With only a little better aim with the white highlights, poor wilbers eyes would not look so crossed.

I printed the original wilber image to help with spreading the frosting.

about the tutorial

This image was part of the 10th Anniversary of the first release of GIMP.

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