Mother-daughter duo recreate a frozen Han Solo made entirely of bread | CBC radio

A mother and daughter in Benicia, California have created a life-size sculpture of Cook war of stars Hero Han Solo – and it’s made entirely of bread.

Dubbed “Pan Solo” by Catherine Pervan and her daughter Hannalee, the six-foot-tall creation depicts a classic scene from the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. Darth Vader had just captured Harrison Ford’s figure in carbonite, and the lovable space villain’s face and hands were contorted in pain.

The breaded Han Solo now stands outside the Pervan family’s bakery, One House Bakery, frozen again, in a different place and time. It’s the mother-daughter duo entering a local scarecrow contest to see which shop on their street is best at deterring birds.

But among people, the reaction to Pan Solo is “just crazy,” says the mother.

“People go up and touch it and poke it and sniff it and try to figure out what it’s made of,” said Catherine Pervan, 64 How it happens Host Nil Koksal. “It’s just amazing how curious and interested people are.”

Pan Solo was born into this universe about a month ago when Pervan roughly drew the shape of her daughter on a piece of plywood.

“She’s 6’1″ and apparently they’re the same height,” she said.

They then used “dead dough”—a mixture of flour, water, and sugar with no commercial leaven or yeast—to sculpt the figure’s shape.

“Bake it for four or five hours until it’s literally rock hard, and then start layering and layering and layering because [the bread,] it’s time-consuming and has a mind of its own,” Pervan said.

“It’s very organic and it’s going to tear or it’ll get too big or too small or weird bubbles will come out.”

The Pervan Bakery has a deck oven with plenty of space on four shelves, from which mother and daughter created Pan Solo piece by piece.

“Sometimes… you pull it out of the oven and look at what you thought it would be, say, a wrist or an ankle or a leg… and it doesn’t look like it. It’s a branch at that point, and you’re like, ‘Hmm, it’s not what I put in the oven, but OK, I’ll try to work with that,'” Pervan said, laughing.

Hannalee Pervan, 37, is the head baker, and she meticulously carved Harrison Ford’s face into the bread, using a store-bought Han Solo mask as a reference point.

“The whole image is really so iconic that we didn’t want to misinterpret the face,” said the elder Pervan. “That was the hardest part because I mean, I could have just done my husband’s face … He’s a handsome guy and all, but everybody would look at it and be like, ‘Oh man, that’s not Harrison Ford.'”

When asked if that means she thinks Ford is prettier than her husband, Pervan said the actor has “pretty luscious lips.”

A much kneaded quality time

For Catherine, her daughter is her boss at work. As they both go home where they live together, she says that she is in charge because she is the mother. But the time they spent together creating Pan Solo was special.

“[It] gives us a chance to just hang out and put on some music and be creative and silly,” she said.

She estimates they’ve spent about 100 hours making Pan Solo in the last month.

“I told her the other day, ‘This is my favorite time of the day … if we can just do this together.'”