Alien "Cakeburster" Video

I had no idea what to get my good friend for her birthday but I knew she was a fan of the Alien series with Sigourney Weaver. Remembering the baby Alien chestburster scene (YouTube), I was inspired to bake this cake and have the little bugger pop out of it.

The video shows some test fires as well as the main event. Unfortunately, the chestburster was a little small but still managed to surprise the birthday celebrant a bit when she went to blow out the candle.

Finding the Chestburster

The Alien chestburster Kubrick. Even in plastic he's an evil little bugger.

Half the fun was building this thing. After sketching some ideas to make sure it was at least possible, I checked online for Alien Chestburster models. Elfsar Comics was a quick bike ride away and had just what I was looking for.

The only problem was these were blind box Kubricks. The boxes were unlabeled and there was no way to know which one held the baby alien. What the box did tell me was that I had a 29% chance of getting the little bugger. Otherwise I'd end up with one of the members of the crew, including the coveted Ripley (6% chance).

At $10 a box this could be a potentially expensive project.

I bought two and opened a box right in the store and, lucky break, got the chestburster on the first go. Phew.

The Alien Launcher

The launching mechanism, built out of Lego and powered by a chopstick.

To get the Kubrick to pop out of the cake, I built a little launcher using Lego and a chopstick. The bent chopstick provided the spring action for the launch. I set it up so pulling a string released it.

I realized the force of the Alien wasn't actually going to break through cake so I decided to have it tear through a piece of tracing paper. The paper was stretched over a tape roll so that it would be easy to break. Test fires worked out pretty good and adding a bit of cherry filling under the whipped cream helped the effect.

Check out this video of one of the early cakeburster test fires.

Building the Cake

The launcher and the chestburster inside the cake after icing.

I went for the easy win and used cake mix for the actual cake. I had to bake three layers to fit the whole thing but ended up carving most of it out as I stacked them one by one. This was a black forest cake so cherry filling went in between.

After covering the entire topside with whipped cream and doing a bit of decoration, it was all set to go!

More Pictures and Videos

Check out the Flickr photoset below for more shots!