Building a TARDIS is a piece of cake

Leigh Henderson spent two months of painstaking work constructing a two feet tall model of the Doctor's blue box, down to the finest details both inside and out.

It looks impressive enough as a simple model... but it is even more amazing when you realise that the whole TARDIS (LED lighting wires excepted!) is edible. A giant cake!

Most of the exterior was made of gum paste. Leigh also used royal icing, rice paper, and sheet gelatin to make the detail. The cake itself is a banana cake with chocolate ganache filling.

Leigh, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, USA and is known as Barbara Jo on her website, makes cakes for fun and her friends.

As well as the TARDIS cake, which she put together last year, horror movie fan Leigh also makes cakes of yukky subjects liks zombies, severed arms and spiders!

Leigh says most of the incredible work is done in her little home kitchen, and her sister Ryan helps as well sometimes.

She says: "Every time I make a cake I'm trying out new materials and new techniques."

She began making cakes about 12 years ago. For the first few years, Leigh was self-taught, experimenting and reading books about cake decorating.

She says: "I'm also a professional theatrical designer, so a lot of the painting and model making skills that I practise in that arena are applicable to cake decorating.

"Then I started taking classes at the Wilton School of Cake Decorating, in Illinois. Their classes are geared towards a much more traditional style of cake decorating then I practise, but a lot of the techniques are adaptable, so that's been very helpful."

She adds: "The TARDIS wasn't for any specific event; I just really wanted to make a TARDIS cake. In fact, we had to throw a party just to have somewhere to serve it.

"I chose the TARDIS for two reasons. One, I thought it would be a really interesting challenge to make it look bigger on the inside than the outside.

"This was the first cake I've made with mirrors in it and the first cake where I've tried wiring up my own strings of LEDs.

"Secondly, I love Doctor Who and I love the TARDIS. I think it's a beautiful idea that a completely banal object might be that magnificent on the inside.

"In some ways, it's the mirror image of my cakes, which might look crazy on the outside, but are fundamentally just normal cakes once you cut into them."

Leigh says she didn't start watching Doctor Who until a few years ago, so still has some catching up to do on the old episodes.

"We've been getting a lot of the Tom Baker episodes from Netflix, and even some going all the way back to William Hartnell.

"While I was in the process of making this cake, I went down to the San Diego Comic-Con, where I got up at 4:30 in the morning and stood in line for five hours to see the Doctor Who panel with Russell Davies and David Tennant!"

Finally, does Leigh not feel that is seems such a shame to cut up a work of art like her TARDIS? Was it eaten?

She responds: "Of course it was eaten! There's no point in making a cake if you're not going to eat it, no matter what it looks like.

"The event of serving cake and the experience of eating cake is what makes cake decorating such a unique art.

"The cake might be a beautiful object in its own right, but in order to really appreciate it, you have to destroy it, and in the act of destroying it you make it a part of yourself."

And what is Leigh planning as her next project? Anything else Doctor Who related?

" I have been pondering ways to make a truly unique Dalek cake.

"Other people have already made some pretty great Dalek cakes, so mine will have to do something pretty extraordinary.

"I'm working on a plan, but I don't want to give it away because I don't want someone else to do it first."

To see more of Leigh's amazing work, visit www.theyrecoming.com.