The cake fiasco

Now I know that the birthday event was not about me, but I have a story to tell. The truth about the cake needs to be told. I'll get it out of the way so we can focus on Birthday posting.

Dan had early on suggested we just make a box cake mix. It would be easy, we could make is square and it might even look like a circus tent if you cut it right. Simple. Well, then I got involved. Once I started talking about fondant Dan washed his hands of the whole process (at least until he had to shove them elbows deep into frosting and be my knight in white frosting and totally save our cake!) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A co-worker who shall remain nameless, Amy, is an enabler. (Sure, sure, you're saying its easy to blame as many people as I want in hindsight, but we all know Mommy overdrive is responsible.) Amy (in a truly kind and gracious gesture) handed off some baking implements from a cake class she'd taken. She enjoyed it, had succeeded in some cake decorating and had no desire to pursue it, so would I, being the creative genius that I am, like to give it a try, its fun. Well it came with a book and ideas that all looked so easy. (Well, they didn't all look easy. The cupcakes with individual animal heads sculpted out of fondant that my mom kept oohing and ahhing at did not look easy, so I could have made it more difficult for my self I guess.)

So I thought I'd give it a shot. I even practiced, but we know where that led with the bowling cake. It turned out fine so long as it was served to people who love me. I thought I'd learned my lesson, I had not. In my defense I didn't even try to make my own fondant like I did the first time. I was simplifying.

We baked the cakes early, let them cool, even froze them a bit so they would be easy to work with. And when you play with fondant, you don't really have to frost pretty. So we didn't.

The beginning of the downfall.


The challenge was the point on the top of the tent. I had some engineering ideas. The short story is that they all involved cutting the 4th cake into triangles. The even shorter story is none of them worked. They didn't stay and as they fell off the top, they took half the cake with it. So here we were with a cake that wouldn't stay together, fondant cut and starting to harden that I couldn't get to hold the cake in anyway.
Fondant strips removed once from the cake as it fell apart the first go round.


Dan to the rescue holding the cake together.


I was literally in a ball on the kitchen floor beginning to cry when my knight in white frosting showed up, used his strong hand to whip that cake into shape and patched it together with the already cut fondant.

The patchwork cake


It worked. It just needed to be prettied up. So on the morning of the party, did I prepare as I should have for the arrival of 10 munchkins? No, I went across the Metroplex in search of primary color fondant. The first place I'd bought it was out of stock, so I drove to Rockwall. If I'd used my noodle I would have realized that more than one chain of stores must sell the stuff, but I was on a mission, so to Rockwall I went. Fondant retrieved, some lessons learned, the second layer of stripes went on well and the cake turned out well enough to receive compliments at the party. I tried not to tell the story to everyone who walked in the door, but several got this long winded version of the cake fiasco and Dan as my savior in all things pastry.

The saved cake.


Lea didn't know the difference and didn't really care. It was cake no matter what it looked like.


In the throws of my breakdown I told Dan and my mom to stop me if I ever spoke of baking our own cake again. As we fell asleep that night, I said "if I ever do it again, I'll know to put a base layer of fondant on before anything else." Dan just sighed and rolled over.