Here are all the details of the Crazy '80s Epcot/Captain EO Mickey cake we had at our
IllumiNations anniversary party in Epcot last week!
- When: February 4, 2019
- Where: Epcot (but the cake was made by the Grand Floridian Wedding Cakes team)
- Size: 6-inch tier atop a 10-inch tier
- Flavors: Top tier – Churro cake filled with white chocolate-cinnamon mousse and milk chocolate feuilletine (flaky pastry crunch) / Bottom tier – Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Buttercream Frosting
- Price: $475 + $75 delivery fee because it was made by the GF and not Epcot
This photo was my inspiration for the cake:
And this is how nerdy I am about cake: I started to get an idea for a metallic silver anniversary cake with puffy fondant rainbows like the ones on these costumes, and I was so excited about how cool it was going to look, I actually couldn’t
sleep that night!
Usually my husband helps me draw the inspiration photos I send to Disney’s pastry teams for all the elaborate cakes I want, because he’s a professional artist and I draw like a 2-year-old. But this one was a surprise, so I had to muddle through on my own. Luckily, I was able to find a line-drawing of a basic 2-tier cake shape online to start with, or else the cake probably would have turned out like a saggy trapezoid! This is what I sent to the Grand Floridian’s Wedding Cakes team (yes, I used ALL the red arrows!).
As you can see, I’m a bit Type A when it comes to cake designs—I’m pretty sure there are JPL rocket schematics that have less detail than this!
But what really helped was that the Grand Floridian assigned my cake to a pastry chef I actually know! We met when I
interviewed her for the Disney Wedding Podcast, and she very kindly kept me updated on the progress of my cake as it was being made. She also helped me know what to ask for in the BEO (Banquet Event Order: The bible of your event followed by every Disney cast member who works on it) and on the design so that the cake would turn out how I’d imagined.
In fact, it turned out even BETTER than I’d imagined because she used her own creativity to improve the design, adding a Hidden Mickey belt buckle to the back and elegantly solving the problem of hiding the light below the Spaceship Earth topper!
But maybe my favorite thing was something I didn’t discover until the next day, when I opened a box of leftover cake to find the top tier had slid off its cake board, revealing a FROSTING SMILEY FACE!!! It turns out her signature is to make a smiley face out of the frosting used to secure each cake to its board, and nobody has ever noticed before!
Oh, and the flavors! So, my favorite Disney cake flavor combos are…
- Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Buttercream Frosting (not Disney’s Cream Cheese Mousse Filling, which tastes like cheesecake to me)
- Chocolate Chip Cake with layered Chocolate Ganache and Peanut Buttter Buttercream Frosting (again, not mousse)
But a few years ago, Disney introduced a Churro flavor for wedding cakes, and it has been a huge hit with all the brides. It’s a cinnamon cake filled with white chocolate cinnamon mousse that has milk chocolate feuilletine (flaky pastry crunch) mixed in. I was skeptical, imagining something like a dry coffee cake or muffin. But I had to try it, so I asked Disney to make the smaller top tier churro.
You guys. It was AMAZING! The cake is so moist, and the filling tastes like Cinnabon smells! I barely even touched the leftovers of the red velvet tier, but I almost single-handedly polished off the remains of the churro tier over the course of our vacation.
Now let’s see a few dozen more photos of that cake, shall we?
). It's always worth asking though!
