8-Bit Pixel Designs

This is a follow-up post to the cake from yesterday. It is a bit more commentary on the type of design. As I said yesterday, the design for the Link cake, as well as the Minecraft Creeper cake, came from a sprite, which refers to a computer pixel image of blocks. These pictures can easily be searched online and are available fro a wide range of different video game, television show, movie, book, and other characters. You can create your own sprite as well, but this is a bit more difficult than using one already made. Once you have found the sprite you would like to use, you might just want to do a little more preparation work. You may want to count the number of rows and columns, and number or letter them, or perhaps number each individual square. Decide on the size each square will be. The squares in my Minecraft cake ere 2cm x 2cm, but I had to make the squares on my Link cake smaller, 1.5cm x 1.5cm because there are more squares in this design, and 2cm x 2cm squares would not have fit. This is why planning ahead is important. This also gave me an extra row of squares on the right, but it isn't too noticeable, and I was able to write Happy Birthday at the bottom. You may want to count how many of each color square there are, in order to prepare enough icing. Printing out the sprite is the best bet for reference, you don't need it to be the actual size, just big enough to pick out the details. 
These designs works very well on rectangular cakes, but they also work nicely with cookies. Just use a basic sugar cookie dough, and tint the dough different colors as needed (and/or make a chocolate dough as well). Baking the dough as a rectangular and cutting into squares after baking will yield more uniform squares. Though I have learned from my Sudoku Cookie Puzzle (July 13th, 2012) that perfect squares in cookies are still difficult to achieve  Be sure to use a cookie dough that isn't too crumbly. Then assemble the cookies on a tray according to the sprite. This is a slightly easier and less messy technique than icing a cake, and still looks really good!