Lego Star Wars 7965 Millennium Falcon

Christmas 2001: my wife and I were Christmas shopping. We went to a Toys R Us and I admired the Lego Millennium Falcon (7190). My wife told me to leave the store and she later came out with a flat box in a bag, a box which made a rattling sound. On Christmas morning, as I unwrapped a rattling box, I was surprised to find... a Scrabble game! Which was also a great gift but wasn't what I had expected. Anyway, we decided to go Boxing Day shopping, and I tried to find the Millennium Falcon, but it was sold out everywhere.
That summer, my wife surprised me again: on my birthday I received another box, which didn't rattle, but which contained a tightly-packed Lego Millennium Falcon that she had bought on eBay. Did I mention that she's awesome? She is.

My birthday present

Well, that was 2002, and in 2004 Lego released a new version of the Millennium Falcon (4504). It improved on the old design a lot. I wanted to buy it but I was told that I couldn't, on account of "You already have one, and I paid way too much money for you to buy another one." And that was that, for years. I watched a few Millennium Falcon models go by, including the oh-so-tempting full-minifig-scale Ultimate Collector Series version. But I didn't buy any of them.

So imagine my surprise last Saturday, when I went downstairs for breakfast, and found a new Millennium Falcon (7965) on the table! With the help of my daughter I put it together. Let me get right to the point: this is one of Lego's best kits ever. It is a very good rendition of the Falcon. The shape is quite accurate; it has several important details such as landing gear, entrance ramp, smuggling compartments, Dejarik table, guns on the top and bottom of the ship (including a place where Han and Luke can sit back-to-back, to recreate the scene in Episode IV when they are escaping the Death Star), and even a little flying orb and welding helmet for Luke to practice his lightsaber. It comes with 6 minifigs (Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Obi-wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader). There are 1254 pieces, but the assembly is in six stages, with the parts separated in numbered bags to make it easier. The resulting model has no useless features or oddly-coloured parts. In fact, I have only two complaints:

• There are no droids. Why include Darth Vader, when he was never on the ship, but leave out the droids? Not that I need more droids, but for the price of this kit I think they could toss in a couple.
• Stickers. Round stickers that are hard to apply and that don't stay stuck. Again, considering how much this kit costs, a handful of printed pieces shouldn't be a luxury.

Old MF

New MF

I thought it would be fun to compare this model with the one from 2000, so I dug it out and put it together. The first thing that struck me was how the new kit really uses appropriate colours in a way that the old kit did not. The old kit used a simpler arrangement: every piece of a certain kind was the same colour. Every 1x8 brick is blue. Every 2x6 plate is dark grey. Every 2x10 plate is light grey. Every 2x4 brick is red. Etc. This makes building the model easier, because it's easier to find the piece you want and easier to see where it goes on the model. However, it makes the resulting model look like a box of Crayola crayons sneezed all over it.

The second thing I noticed, and it's the main problem with the old model, is that the designers didn't try very hard to use advanced techniques to achieve the Falcon's shape. The cockpit hangs off the side but doesn't look like it's connected by a walkway. The cockpit is the wrong shape (despite using a custom canopy piece). The Falcon's hull is made of four huge quarter-circle dome plates, which aren't that accurate to the movies and which make the ship look like a hamburger.

Old MF, lid off

New MF, peeled open

New MF, peeled open

The new ship goes way beyond standard building techniques to achieve its shape. Its perimeter is made of hinged sections to simulate roundness. The roof is made of hinged plate sections that peel open to access the interior. The detailing is better. Even something like the gun turret: both models have it; both models use a similar approach, but the new one uses more pieces and better colours to make the whole thing look nicer. (Not to mention that the old model only had a top gun, no bottom gun).

I loved the Millennium Falcon model when I got it in 2002. But the new one is so superior that it almost makes you want to pretend that Lego never made the old one.

Old Crew

New Crew

Lego Atlantis 7985 City of Atlantis

The Christmas season brought several new Lego kits into my home, one of which was the City of Atlantis. This is a fairly large set, with 686 pieces, and it mainly consists of a sunken Greek-inspired temple, along with a small submarine and a brick-built giant crab.

There are 5 minifigs which come with the set: two human divers, two aquatic monsters, and one human statue.  The monsters are not bad; they both consist of a printed torso and a rubbery "head" which covers the torso to some degree. The red monster has lobster claws, which are basically lobster-claw-shaped accessories that a standard minifig hand holds onto.

The submarine is a small sub with room for a single minifg inside. It features a green tome, a large propeller, two flick-fire missiles, and two arms with claws suitable for picking up sea treasure or recalcitrant monsters. The sub is well-built, using fairly generic parts to good effect, and doesn't have any glaring flaws such as huge gaps in the cockpit. It isn't very detailed but it also isn't the main focus of this kit.

The crab is a brick-built monster that defends the temple. Again, the construction is simple and elegant, not over-doing it but providing a nice little "bad-guy" counterpoint to the submarine. The pieces used are fairly generic and useful and it looks good and is somewhat poseable. I guess in the Lego Atlantis storyline, the monster sea creatures like this crab are actually machines, or so the stickers would suggest. I don't really like stickers on Lego, so I left several of them off where I felt they weren't essential.

The city itself, or rather, temple, is a pretty good representation of the facade of a Greek temple, if that temple had been submerged underwater for some time and partially ruined. There is a broken column, some seaweed, a locked gate, a treasure chest, and an arch. The temple's roof is just two narrow plates, but from the front it looks good. It's fairly obvious that a Lego kit such as this would never include proper walls or an enclosing roof, but given the constraints the overall look is quite good.

There are several booby-traps in the temple; the archway leading to the steps has an axe that can swing down; there is a trap-door, and the column that isn't ruined is hinged so that it can fall over (I suppose that might not be a proper trap, per se). There are also two flick-fire missiles in the roof of the temple but I'd rather pretend those aren't there.

One thing that strikes me as odd about these traps is that given the underwater setting, traps which rely on gravity (falling axe, trap door, falling column) seem pretty out of place. Couldn't an invader just swim down from above? In fact, that's the most likely angle of attack anyway, given that the good guys have a submarine. Maybe those traps are left over from when Atlantis wasn't submerged? One can only guess.

I've left the most interesting detail of this kit until last. This kit, like several other Atlantis sets, features a "key" which can be used to unlock a secret. At the base of the temple steps there is a round pedestal which turns freely, until the key is in place; when the key is in place turning the key causes the statue minifig to pop up from under a trap door. This little mechanism is quite nice and very fun to play with (statue goes up, statue goes down, statue goes up...). I think many fantasy creations besides "Atlantis" could use a mechanism like this and can foresee this sort of feature becoming an element in one of my future creations. It's all connected underneath with Technic parts, so it should be easy enough to extend into any kind of complicated machinery.

Overall, I find that this is a very well-designed kit. Many of the Atlantis kits didn't interest me and I avoided the theme until now. This set, however, is quite nice. The pieces are almost all universally useful. It is a good source of white parts, especially the grooved round bricks that make up the columns. The minifigs are good. The kit is well-designed with lots of interesting play features. My only complaint is the stickers. I still find it annoying when parts require stickers. I understand that this keeps the price down, but to me putting a sticker on a piece is almost as bad as painting a piece or cutting one. Don't ask me to explain that, I know it's irrational.

LEGO Kingdoms 7189 Mill Village Raid

I recently found the Lego Kingdoms set 7189 on sale at Toys R Us and decided that I had to have it.

There are lots of things I like about the latest Kingdoms line. First, I am crazy about the evil faction, the dragon knights. They have great minifigs and colours. So a set that features these minifigs is always nice to see. Of course, the main highlight of this relatively large set is not the knights, but rather the peasants.

This set represents the continuation of the recent years' foray into medieval scenes featuring civilians. In the past, virtually all Castle sets featured only combatants, except the odd wagon now and then that might have a lonely farmer. Lately, LEGO has added more "daily life" sets to the mix. One signature set in that series was the Medieval Market, which featured medieval city buildings, farmers, cattle, food, and other day-to-day things you might find in a medieval city.  Now with 7189 they are bringing out a rather large farm set that really shines.

This set is divided up into four stages. Each stage has numbered polybags of parts, so that it's easy to assemble the first time. The first bag has the minifigs and the wagon.  The wagon is nothing great but frankly, who cares. Lego has almost never put out a good wagon and that never bothered me. It serves the purpose of having something to hitch to the horse. The horse, by the way, is really nicely done, with shaggy hooves and blinders. Not a warhorse at all. Aside from the horse, you also get three chickens, two goats, and a pig. I've never seen Lego farm animals before and I have to say that these are really, really, really cute. They look good next to the farmer, his wife, and their son (who needs a haircut, in my opinion :) )

The second stage is the windmill. This is a nice little building, on a rotating base, with a sloped roof. The windmill actually rotates a central shaft that has a grindstone on it. You can turn a crank or turn the blades themselves and the stone grinds. It's really well done. The only thing I didn't like about this windmill is that it's very fragile, for a building. I can never recall when I've ever accidentally crushed a model I was building while trying to attach a piece, but this happened a couple of times while I was putting this together.

The third stage is one half of the barn, and the fourth stage is the other half. The barn is well made; it swings apart so that you can reach inside, and it features a winch, a trap door, and two stalls for the animals. The construction is fairly sturdy and it looks nice when it's completed. There is not too much to remark on, construction-wise.

One thing I did notice is that this model shows how some of the parts in the Lego repertoire have evolved over time.  Consider the door that is used on the mill. On an older kit, this door would be used. It attaches using a special brick that has little tabs hanging off. This mechanism is very old; I have lego from the early 1980s that uses this for shutters. It's also fairly fragile; the tabs on the brick could break off, and the doors fall off during play. In 7189 the door looks like this, and the clips that hold it in place are standard vertical claws. In this particular model, the claws are part of a giant, 3-tall brick with the claws permanently molded in. But there is nothing special about these claws and any standard claw can be used.  The same is true of almost every other hinge in this set. The older hinges have all been replaced with standard claws.  This is an amazing improvement, because it means that you can now be far more versatile in how you connect these pieces. I'm a bit disappointed that all my old doors are obsolete but I'm glad to see real progress.

The other thing I was glad to see in this model is that there are virtually no off-colour parts that are included for bizarre reasons. LEGO often puts a single bright-blue brick in the middle of a model for some reason. In this set, that was kept to a minimum and most of the colour variation is on-palette, that is, it's different shades of brown and grey. And I love the new super-dark brown, and the dark-tan, both of which are used a lot in this set.

Overall, aside from the fragility of the windmill, I find that this set is extremely well constructed. The part selection is really good. The minifigs and animals are excellent. Overall a very good set and worth owning.

Fedora 12

I am a glutton for punishment. This is the only conclusion I can come to because I keep trying to install newer versions of Fedora on my various computers.  Recently I tried Fedora 12 on my LG R500, which was relatively happily running Fedora 10.

I ran into a problem right off the bat: the installer wouldn't boot.  The kernel just got stuck partway along and froze. It turns out there is a bug with the TPM driver on certain hardware, which causes a timeout error:

tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62
tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62
tpm_tis 00:0a: tpm_transmit: tpm_send: error -62

This error can be worked around by disabling timeouts in the tpm module.  Unfortunately, even though this issue was known before Fedora 12 was released, it wasn't fixed, nor was it even mentioned in the release notes.  Sigh.


The touchpad also wasn't working properly.  After install, you can't tap it to click on things.  The simulated 3rd button when you click in the top right corner is broken. I googled and found that the touchpad needs to be configured in the Gnome control panel, however I'm running KDE and it didn't seem to have a touchpad applet.  Turns out it wasn't installed; yum install kcm_synaptics fixed that and I was able to enable the functionality that should be on by default.

Fedora 10 introduced a new graphical boot for systems which have appropriate video drivers; in Fedora 12 nVidia hardware is included using the nouveau driver.  The nouveau driver, however, is unfinished and it corrupts the display often (but the graphical boot is nice).  In the end I had to install the binary nvidia driver because flash video was freezing the machine. 

Speaking of boot, on boot Fedora starts the GDM Gnome login manager.  Annoyingly, KDE's switch user feature is still broken unless started from KDM; you try to switch users and instead the screen locks and that's all that happens.  No error, no warning, just a broken feature.  Switching to KDM requires editing a config file.

Installing software through kpackagekit is needlessly difficult.  Finding the right package to enable mp3 playback in amarok is an exercise in futility.  Amarok itself provides no indication of what is wrong; it just tries to play a song and fails, skipping the song and going to the next, with no error message or anything.  If all your music is mp3s amarok will just keep chewing through the playlist, happily not playing anything.

Also, for the first time in about 4 years, my printer doesn't work out of the box.  Drivers for every possible bizarre input type or video card or sound card or network card or HPC IO controller or satellite launcher are installed, but my printer's drivers were not.

Finally, because I wasn't feeling punished enough, I also tried upgrading my HTPC to Fedora 12 from Fedora 11.  I have no idea how badly things are broken because, to be honest, the Fedora 11 installation was pretty fuzzed to begin with.  But at least the upgrade installed and nothing seriously broke.

On the HTPC the KDE installation is missing some pieces because I can't log in using KDE as my desktop; instead I get no error message but am booted back to the login screen.  Some KDE apps don't work properly.  Also annoying is the fact that I can adjust my fonts to make things readable on the TV but only one of GNOME or KDE sees those settings, the other doesn't, but my menu contains either KDE apps or GNOME apps but not both.  An average user would be pretty annoyed that they want large fonts, and 90% of their desktop uses the right fonts, but there is a hidden, mysterious control panel that asks you the same exact questions you already answered in some other program, but you have to answer again or else 10% of your apps will look wrong.  Now, this is a Gnome vs KDE issue, but the fact remains that Fedora 11, installed fresh, and then 12 installed as an upgrade overtop, left me with a hybrid Gnome/KDE system, where the only graphical software installer uses tiny fonts because it's a KDE app and I'm stuck in Gnome.

If I get the HTPC working properly again using MythTV I am going to never upgrade it again.

LEGO Creator 4998 Stegosaurus

For Christmas I received the Lego Stegosaurus. I had been wanting this set for a while and was eagerly anticipating it. Of course, with a toddler running around the house it was several days before I had time to build it, but it was well worth the wait.

This set is one of the best Lego kits I have seen in a while. It has 731 pieces and comes with instructions for three different models (as many Creator kits now do). The main model, the Stegosaurus, is easily the best of the three, but the Tyranosaur and flying dinosaur (I'm not sure it's anatomically correct for any flying dino) are still decent builds.

The instructions are easy to follow; any child should have no difficulty at all even though the building techniques are somewhat advanced. In fact I found the instructions a little too simplistic and found that I had to flip a lot of pages to get only a few pieces put on. But I have become adept at noticing when there is going to be a lot of repetition for building a symmetrical model (such as the legs: they are mirror images of each other) so I can save time by building both hind legs at the same time, etc (That saves a TON of time when building the AT-AT).

One thing I noticed about this set was that the piece selection is truly stellar. Many Lego kits come with part selections that are not what you'd expect to see in a given model. For example, the AT-AT is a big grey walking machine, but it is actually full of bright blue and red bricks for the internal structure. When building the main model that is not a big deal because those pieces are hidden, but if you want to take it apart and build something else those pieces lose a lot of their value. The reason Lego puts these primary-coloured pieces in is to make it easier for children to build the set because the pieces are easier to find, harder to mistake one for another, and easier to follow in the instructions.

Thankfully, the Stegosaurus model has almost no unnecessary colours in it. It features a fairly wide palette of colours, mainly green, dark green, dark grey, brown, and yellow, but between the greys and greens and the odd black or brown piece here and there the instructions get buy without any bright blue or turquoise ruining the part selection. The importance of this can't be overstated. It means that every single piece is useful for further construction of dinosaurs. And these earth-tone colours are also extremely useful for landscaping. And the dark green would look really good on a car or space ship. The greys, of course, are super versatile. Suffice to say that you don't regret any of the pieces in this kit. The resulting dinosaurs are not a single uniform colour, but they still look good.

The construction of the models is also quite well done. The stegosaurus is most impressive; it has a good feel, decent posability, and an imposing appearance. My only complaint is that I find the mouth too fragile; if I open the lower jaw it often comes right off. The tyrannosaur is quite good and doesn't seem to suffer for being the secondary model. You don't get a feeling that they compromised the design to make it fit the parts selection of the Stegosaurus. My main complaints about this model are that I don't like how the hands look and how the head is attached to the body. The head joint is the worst part: the head only turns left or right which severely limits how the dinosaur can be posed.

I was pleased to see a few surprising uses of pieces, such as using wing pieces instead of plates for the tyrannosaur. The yellow line along its back is actually the yellow wing pieces from the stegosaurus's plates; they are merely turned inwards so that the wing portion is hidden. This leaves gaps where the wing piece doesn't fully cover the studs it is placed on, but as this is inside the body of the T-rex it is invisible and it doesn't hurt the model in any way. This use of these pieces in this way is what Lego is all about: building stuff with the pieces you have.

Overall I strongly recommend this kit. Great part selection and good models. Easy and fun to build. What's not to like?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I just saw Harry Potter 6 yesterday. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. 4 and 5 were not great movies; the pacing was too fast and too much dialogue had been cut to make the movie fit the 2.5 hour format. With Harry Potter 6 they managed to redeem themselves and make the movie work.

There are a few notable plot changes in the movie; most crucially there was a battle inserted in the middle and one removed from somewhere else. Some minor details here and there were changed, sometimes in ways that seemed odd, and sometimes in ways that violate the canon of the story, but nothing truly important was tampered with. Most characters appear without introduction and if you didn't recognize them from the books or previous movies you won't be able to recognize them now either. But aside from that the movie progressed fairly well and in accordance with the original story.

This is perhaps the best instalment so far since the first movie, which was the most true to the book.

One thing that bothers me is that the Death Eaters seem to have the ability to fly. In the 7th book they point out that Voldemort can fly and everyone is surprised by that. Oh well, it's not an important detail.

One thing I found funny is that certain actors have aged A LOT since the first movie and others don't appear to. This makes Rupert Grint, who's 21, look really out of place in Hogwarts, where the incoming students are 11. And some of the teachers in the school have aged a lot and I worry that they won't be around to play their roles in book 7. Maybe the director will film the end of that book sooner, since the teachers play a bigger role at the end than at the beginning.

Anyway, overall I recommend this movie to all fans of the books or the movies. It won't really disappoint; as far as movie adaptations go it's one of the better ones.

Lego Indiana Jones and the Lost Tomb

I recently picked up the Indiana Jones Lego set where Indy and Marion are in the Well of Souls (From Raiders of the Lost Ark).


It's a pretty decent little set, with a low price point. As usual, Lego's Candian pricing is crazy, but it was on sale so I got it at a fair price.

This small set basically represents the Well of Souls, including a bunch of snakes, and the Ark of the Covanent. In a stunning departure from the movie cannon, the Ark is still present while Marion and Indy try to free themselves.

As far as playability goes, the set offers a few tricks; the Marion minifig has two faces, one happy and one sad; the back wall of the tomb has a snake-dispensing trap, and the Egyptian statues can be toppled over, breaking through the back wall of the tomb (which are held in place with only a single stud for easy destruction).

Overall the quality of the set is good, though I would have liked a couple more minifigs (where's Sallah?). My only complaint is the use of stickers for the Egyptian art motifs. One of the stickers offensively covers two separate pieces, which means it will tear in half or get pulled off at some point in the future. I didn't apply that sticker. Also, some of the stickers (especially the eyes on the statues) aren't really necessary to get the full enjoyment from the set.

Piece-wise these are useful parts, in tan and that new brown colour that's the colour of chocolate milk. I really like the colour and this set has two baseplates that use it, as well as a few tiles. The normal tan pieces are also very useful and I was pleased to see that the pillar was made up of lots of individual round bricks instead of the less-useful one-piece pillar. I also noticed that the wall pieces are now hollow in the back, instead of solid like regular bricks. That's fine for most building but it's annoying in general that the pieces are getting a bit cheaper.

Overall I rate this set highly. It's a cute little set and you can't beat the Indiana Jones minifig.

6243 Brickbeard's Bounty Lego Pirate Ship

This year Lego returned to the classic Pirate line, releasing a handful of new kits with pirate themes. I was pleased to see that the Canadian prices for these kits was roughly on par with the exchange rate, give or take a few bucks, and doubly pleased to see these kits on sale at Sears for 15% off (actually, all toys were on sale).

So, I picked up the 6243 Brickbeard's Bounty pirate ship. Brickbeard is the bad guy of the pirate line. He is basically your stereotypical "pirate" character; he has a hook for a hand and a peg leg and an eyepatch. He also wears a skull and crossbones hat. He comes with an assortment of pirate henchmen to raid the seas and torment the good guys.

While building this set I was often thinking back to the pirate ship my brother had as a child. His was the good guys ship and thus it was smaller than Blackbeard's ship of the day. The modern ship is bigger yet and it's interesting to see how the building techniques and the materials have advanced over the years.

For one thing there are fewer parts that are ship-specific. The mast pieces are now standard pillar pieces and the rigging is a standard ladder shape that can be easily re-used for other things. The ship itself is still made up of several large hull pieces, but these pieces are more modular than they used to be, allowing for even bigger ships to be made should you ever get your hands on two of these.

The minifigs are also significantly improved over the old days. Their torsos are now painted on both sides and the maiden minifig has a two-sided head, so that she can be either screaming or happy. There is also lots of attention to detail; one of the pirate figs even has a gold tooth.

Aside from the minifigs, the ship itself has many unremarkable pieces. This isn't a bad thing; those pieces are the versatile ones. Building it was super easy; in fact the instructions seemed especially simplistic. I guess this is aimed at the younger builders but I'm used to more complex instructions. That's ok, though; a skilled builder can put it together in about an hour and a child should be able to do it unassisted in a few hours. And it's worth the wait.

The ship is quite large and has a captain's cabin with a removable roof for easy play. There are three cannons that can fire the round 1x1 cylinder bricks, including one placed rather dubiously on the stern of the ship, right where the captain stands. I guess Lego cannon don't need to pay attention to Newton's Third Law.

Aside form the stern cannon, and the usual Lego design foibles (platforms that have no stairs to reach them, rooms with only three walls, etc), one amusing bit of nonsense is the mounted rifles. Did I say rifles? Of course these are muskets, in keeping with the era. It's a bit funny to see a musket mounted on the front of a rowboat, for example. For one thing, if a musket is pointed downwards the ammo can actually fall out. As well, a musket has only one shot in it before it must be reloaded, and this is always done with the musket in a vertical position. Therefore these mounted muskets are pretty strange. I guess most kids won't notice but it is a bit odd, and I wish Lego could impart some historical lessons alongside the "historical" sets. The rowboat itself is also rather funny because it's rather implausible that the redcoats would be rowing up to the ship; a stealth mission might work but those white pants, bright white oars, and the frickin' lantern might be a bit of a giveaway. Plus one of the redcoats isn't armed well enough. You can always redistribute the weapons any way you like, but according to the instructions that soldier only has paddles and that mounted musket.

Some other details I noticed: there are some new shades of brown in this set that I've never seen before; they are very nice shades and I hope to see more bricks in those colours; the shark piece of old has been replaced with a much bigger, meaner-looking shark; the old shark could fit a single brick in his mouth; the new shark can swallow a whole minifig. The cannons are no longer dark grey but instead a super-dark grey that is almost black. It is another new colour and I like it a lot. These pirates are particularly brazen about their treasure hoard; even the treasure chest is gold and it's stored on the top deck by the steering wheel.

My only complaints about this set are regarding how the sails are attached. The old ships used one-stud wide plates to form spars which had pegs to mount the sails. This led to a robust sail attachment system. This ship uses technic tubes for spars. This is much cheaper, and requires less building, but leads to a rather fragile sail configuration. Aside from that, my only minor nitpick is that I find the use of all these different coloured pieces here and there a bit annoying. On a set like this it would be nice if there wasn't a single blue brick or even light-grey. But true to Lego form, there are lots of odd-coloured pieces all over the place. Lego says this makes it easier to assemble the model, but I find it distracting and I wish Lego kits had more uniform colour schemes. However once the model is assembled you don't notice it too much.

Overall I recommend this kit. If I ever find time I'll dig up my brother's old ship and do a detailed comparison.

Build-a-bear cake pan

I bought a Build-a-bear cake pan from Williams-Sonoma for Christmas. This was meant as a Christmas present for my wife, however because I do the baking it's really the CAKES that are the present, and thus we tried making one of these cakes over the weekend to give it a trial run before Christmas.

Things didn't start off well because the cake pan was defective. The pan's finish wasn't properly applied and had a big crack, and part of it was flaking off. I recommend that anyone planning to buy one of these carefully examine it in the store. The boxes can be opened without destroying them so the store staff shouldn't mind.

After exchanging the pan, I followed the recipe on the back of the box. The box comes with a recipe for a bundt cake that is quite easy to make. The cake tasted great, although you can use any recipe you want, as long as the cake is dense enough to stand up on its own. My only complaint is that the recipe is printed on the box, when it should be a paper insert instead. Now I have to transcribe it. I've noticed this defect with every Williams-Sonoma cake pan. I guess it saves on packaging, but please, these pans aren't cheap. At least give us a sheet of paper!

Assembling the 3-D bear isn't hard at all. After the cake has finished baking, you cool it for a few minutes in the pan, remove it from the pan, cool it some more, then put it back in the pan. This process takes a few hours in total. When the cake is fully cooled, you put it back in the pan so that you can cut off the extra that rises above the pan. Then you spread icing on half, and put the other half on top, then pop it into the fridge so that the icing can set. We had a slight problem: the cake didn't come cleanly out of the pan the second time, so one half of the bear was decapitated. Luckily we were able to repair it with some icing and skewers; in the end the damage wasn't noticeable.

Decorating the finished cake is the hard part. I had a lot of difficulty applying the glaze and the brown sugar which simulates the fur. The Williams-Sonoma website has a how-to video which shows a woman applying the "fur". I notice that her cake doesn't look as good as the one on the box (though it is far better looking than mine). In the end the fur was so difficult that I think my next cake will just use a glaze or icing fur. My "furry" bear appears to have some kind of odd patchy disease. Maybe next time I'll try to make some fondant to clothe the bear; at least then you don't need to put as much fur on.


Despite the bear's poor appearance, it was a lot of fun to make and delicious to eat. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll have perfected my technique.

Edit:
The man from Williams-Sonoma eventually did mail me the Santa Template. Stay tuned; next Christmas I'll try it out. Also, I eventually did make a new bear. It turned out better.