In the summer of 2021, my sister Lauren and I appeared on the second season of LEGO Masters on FOX. These breakdowns delve into each episode and talk about the process behind the build, the challenges Lauren and I faced, and the stories of our finished products.
When Lauren and I heard “Make n’ Shake” for Episode 3, we knew we were in for the most technical challenge yet. We’re not engineers, or architects. How do you build a 4-foot structure that can withstand intense forces, AND make it look good?
The first thing we needed to settle on was our concept. Almost instantly after the challenge was announced, Lauren whispered to me “let’s build a cake,” and I immediately thought “YES.” That would be right up our alley. We love bringing storytelling into everything we build, and although it wasn’t featured in the episode, we came up with a full story surrounding what would become our giant cake, all before we started laying bricks down:
Georgina the Giant is a princess in the land of giants, and today is her special day. The royal chefs have prepared a cake with all her favorites: bright-colored frosting, 4 layers, and tiny human sprinkles, all screaming for their lives. She loves them! Every year, Georgina gets so excited about her birthday that she bounds into the room, toppling her cake. But this year, the royal chefs think they’ve made a cake that can withstand even Georgina’s birthday excitement.
Once our story was fleshed out, we then had to figure out how we were going to build this thing. We decided very quickly that we were going to stick to our guns, and build this cake the only way we knew would be strong: interlocking bricks, completely packed solid. There’s one problem with this technique, though. It’s extremely inefficient. That meant we had to build fast. Faster than we’d ever built before. We sprinted to the brick pit and grabbed as many 2x10 and 2x12 bricks as we could, and we got to work locking everything down.
Then, we realized there was another challenge that we didn’t anticipate going in: the baseplate we were given. Everyone was provided a gray baseplate with glued-on brick structures that included some SNOT connection points and Technic connection points. It did not work with our plan of interlocking bricks at all, but we were stuck with this glued base. We decided to use some of the SNOT connection points to lock our bottom layers down on the interior, before building up with straight brick. If I were to do this challenge again, I would have just ignored the base and built brick all around it, to have one consistent technique all the way through. But we were totally thrown by this baseplate designed to “help” us!
Once Lauren and I started building the cake up with layer upon layer of interlocked bricks, it was off to the races. Our fingers were sore, aching, and calloused, but we powered through. At the top of each layer, we included SNOT connections to allow for icing to be built out on the sides using curved white plates for a scalloped edge.
Around half-way through, we looked over and realized there might be another cake in the room. We had our heads down the whole challenge with frantic brick-laying, so we had no idea that Natalie & Michelle had a similar idea. Luckily, theirs was a wedding cake, which is pretty distinct from a birthday cake. That didn’t prevent the producers from trying to make “Cake-Gate” a thing!
Lauren and I were frequently measuring our build with the tape measures we were provided, to make sure we were pacing ourselves correctly in terms of height. We’d get so absorbed in locking the bricks that sometimes we’d forget to check the height--so our second cake layer got to be quite big! We were already well past 2 feet at the 4-hour mark, which is what we wanted, since we needed time at the end to make the birthday cake come alive with candles and sprinkles.
With exactly an hour left to go, Lauren and I were done building the main structure of the cake. We then got to create all our crazy details! Lauren rushed off to the minifigure bin of the brick pit to find every single scared-looking minifigure face, as well as every pink and blue outfit to match the color scheme of our cake.
While Lauren was cranking out over 100 minifigure “sprinkles,” I built the candles for the cake. I lucked out in finding some round, ridged 2x2 gold bricks in the brick pit, which looked just like massive candles when stacked! I added large flame parts to the top, and they were good to go. I also gave the frosting layers some extra texture on the top, which served a double purpose of holding in the sides. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have any flat, breakaway surface layers, and were able to hide our reinforcement in the frosting.
Lauren was still powering out the minifigure sprinkles with 10 minutes to go, and I was frantically placing them on the cake at all kinds of crazy angles, like they were plastered there and left to scream for their lives! Lauren made some really funny figures--some are holding bananas, one guy is even holding a crab. We placed some human food on there for Georgina to enjoy: ice cream cones and pies. We had a surfer dude, a cat lady, and even some pugs. The only thing they had in common was their scared expression, and their appreciation of pink and blue outfits.
Finally, time was up. Lauren and I carefully wheeled our build into the gallery--terrifying images of Season 1 flashing through our heads!--and once it was placed in the gallery, we were happy with how our final product looked aesthetically. But, would it be strong?
As Will fired up the Brickter Scale, I wasn’t too nervous at first. Our building was so dense, and we had put an intense amount of effort into packing the whole thing solid. But as it got up to the higher levels, I got a bit more nervous. Once it hit level 8, one part started to crack: the base. I should’ve seen it coming! The one part that wasn’t packed solid with bricks was the one part that started to fall apart. It still held on with some sway at 9, and then finally the whole base caved away at 10. It led to a clean break, and the tower made a crazy THUD as it hit the ground. I remember thinking it must’ve made a dent in the floor! Would production care about the floor??
Lauren and I were proud of how this build came out and the story behind it. When we were telling our story about Georgina the Giant and the human sprinkles to the judges, Will cracked up and stopped us--”Wait, you know this is a kids’ show, right?”
This episode flew by for us; we were so zoned-in on building as fast as possible. Our fingers were sore for days afterward! We just felt bad for whoever had to break apart our packed-solid cake. In the end, we think Georgina must have had a great birthday, and hopefully next year the royal chefs will bake a cake that can withstand a Brickter scale all the way to 11!
