Club Jade

Soon you won’t need to head to eBay to get an old-school Star Wars cake pan: Wilton is bringing back Darth Vader this summer. Now, finding a recipe for black icing that tastes decent will be your only problem! (via)

Amanda Oakleaf Cakes built this amazing life-sized (6’4′) stormtrooper cake for Boston’s Arisia Convention. Thankfully, they documented the construction process!

Young Archer here is well on his way to complete Star Wars indoctrination. (via)

• Mark Hamill, new to Twitter, did a brief fan Q&A on Tuesday. Topics included Alec Guinness, the most difficult Star Wars actor and the craziest thing a fan has asked him to sign.

• Obi-Wan is one of Empire’s ten movie figures better than real dads. He only lied for your own good, Luke. Also on the list? Indiana Jones.
• The Death Star PR folks have written an open letter to Natalie Portman regarding her newborn son.
• Jess whips up outfits inspired by Luke’s Dagobah gear and Ahsoka in Clone Wars S3.
• Check out Redditer Punqington’s awesome Millennium Falcon wedding cake.
• Apparently the new Miss USA, California’s Alyssa Campanella, is a Star Wars fan.

Eric Walker, who played Mace Towani in the made-for TV Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, is raising money to release Growing Up on Skywalker Ranch, a book documenting his “adventures in the Star Wars universe” and other behind-the-scenes tidbits. Interested? You can pledge funds at the link.

• The logo on the Celebration 6 teaser site is now gold. What does it mean? Sorry, but fool me once…

• On Etsy: Han and Leia wedding bands.
• Threepio, Chewbacca, Vader and a stormtrooper carved crayons.
• Death Star garbage masher cake and more from the blog Kitchen Fun With My Three Sons.
• The U.S. Army’s “walking truck” concept from the 60′s: a real-life AT-AT?
• On Tumblr? You’ll want to check out Lit and Star Wars and Texts from the Millennium Falcon.

Yippee-ki-yay. Star Wars is SpaceWestern.com’s #1 most influential space western. Please spare us all the argument about how it’s totally not a space western; It’s an amalgam, silly. (Also, while I don’t think anyone can deny Firefly, isn’t it a bit early to rank it quite so high on a list that’s supposed to be about influence? Far as I can tell, the only thing that it’s inspired so far is a funny clip of Castle and Fox renewing Dollhouse.)

Art or something like it. io9 collects the greatest velvet paintings of science fiction. (As Wookieepedia is to Cracked, Google Image Search is to io9.) Giant Samurai Vader was a big hit on Twitter, and the official site gives us another peek at Visions featuring some of Club Jade’s favorite things (non-alcoholic division.) Dude, we get it: It’s a Star Wars fine art book, right? Enough teasing already.

Contain your shock. Darth Vader is Lawful Evil. No!

Baked-good corner. Two extremely well-made Star Wars cakes – Jabba and Darth Maul – from L.A.’s Rosebud Cakes. For the 30-year-old child party moll in all of us. As for something we can all achieve, take a cue from the sarlacc bundt cake.

Collecting. The ten most embarrassingly collectible Star Wars toys of the 90′s. Why didn’t I sell my Special Edition Luke when it was actually worth something? WHY?

At random. Power Droid gots to get his money.

There really is something for everyone on Etsy. I’m prepping a few posts for next week, and I ran across a Luke and Mara Wedding cake topper. (What a post-ROTJ EU pairing has to do with The Clone Wars I have no idea.) The seller, Hildoom, also has a Yoda Birthday Cake topper for sale.

Cars. Jalopnik is on something of a streak, exploring the hot rod culture of Star Wars and likening the ABT Audi R8 V10 to something that “Anakin’s coke dealer” would drive.

Back to school. StarWars.com takes a look back at the 70′s with retro class cear from Helix.

Lists. Palpatine makes #1 on Sci-Fi Squad’s top ten sci-fi deaths.

Cakes. A neat Millenium Falcon by Da Bombe Desserts.

If only… io9 suggests swapping the writing staffs of The Clone Wars and the The Venture Brothers, which may be the only way to get me to cheerfully watch the former.

Be sure to take a closer look at these great Star Wars cupcakes by Spoolsisters (Tracy & Carrie) at Flickr. (via)

I’m not sure how much posting there will be for the next couple of days, as JadeCon is officially gearing up on Thursday and I’ve got a ton and half to do before flying out tomorrow. But as always, we’ll have laptops and try our best to post from the con! (You can peruse the previous years, at your peril, here.)

Doyouloveanapple made these fantastic Mighty Mugg-based cakes for her partner’s birthday! They both feature homemade marshmallow fondant. (via)

To start us off, here are some adorable Star Wars cupcakes created by Dottylicious and photgraphed by Red Wolf.

Next, a Lego Star Wars cake by Meg, who has several Star Wars cakes to her name.

A Han in Carbonite groom’s cake photographed by Mandy Lackey.

And last but by no means least, Fionnuala & Scott Thompson’s multi-level Star Wars wedding cake. (Be sure to click through for detail shots!)

Find even more in the Star Wars Cakes group, or our own cake-related tags.

Or death? Cake Wrecks went on a Star Wars twofer last week. First the bad cakes, then the good ones. At right, one of the more disturbing cakes, which I’m pretty sure is what happens when Yoda mates with a certain fertility idol.

• Events: R2-D2 Builders and more at Texas Build Off 2009. Meanwhile, last weekend Star Wars LEGO fans took over San Diego’s LEGOland. Get started on those pics at The Brothers Brick.

• Humor: If villains used internet forums.
• T-shirts: Bow-Tie Fighter. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.