My boy turned one today, marking a momentous achievement in his short life. For someone to journey from being a human-shaped blob to showing characteristics like curiosity, cheekiness, playfulness, frustration and basically being a tiny but personality-filled individual... is momentous indeed.
It was also a momentous achievement in my short to medium-length life, to have been the primary facilitator of this process. To that end, I felt it was a rite of passage for me to bake a cake.
This I did, with disastrous results.
We decided that the celebrations earlier this week would involve afternoon tea and cake with the family (which there are a large number of), and I decided to make a monster birthday cake to go with the monster-themed serviettes I had bought. Logical.
The day of the party, all was going well with the cake assembly, until I started on the icing. What was needed was a thick, spreadable icing to cover all the joins in the monster's body, but what we got even after the instructed hour in the fridge to set, was a thin mixture that dripped off a spoon. I shoved it in the freezer and started biting my nails. The party was in an hour, I was out of icing sugar and Birthday Boy was asleep so I couldn't duck down to the store for more.
Half an hour before the party I thought the only thing for it was to give it a try. I pulled the icing out of the freezer, held the bowl over the cake, took a deep breath and poured:
Yes, poor Herbert didn't make it to the party. He would have embarrassed me, what with his legs clearly not joined to his body, and the brown puddle he was lying in and all.
After a despondent phone call to my husband who was on the way home from work and very close to the Cheesecake Shop, Birthday Boy ended up with a cake far superior to any monster I could have made, thick, spreadable icing or not:
And look, it didn't match the serviettes, but the end result was the same:
Birthday Monster Mash-Up
Happy Birthday, my special little guy!
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4 Thoughts:
I was sad that the mud puddle monster (very much like your own) did not end up making it to the party. I think you did a fabulous job, and it was fated that a monster cake would be covered in mud... yummy delicious mud. At least there are pictures. It's a little reminiscent of Leif's second Birthday cake that was supposed to be a soccer ball, and looked more like a black and white blob, and there are no pictures of the result of literally hours of work. Or my 29th birthday cake that I made myself and ran out of icing sugar... and it turns out caster sugar will not achieve the same results and surprise guests to come and "eat" it...or more gawk at it...in horror... Or the time Leif's cake didn't rise... I suppose if it tastes like chocolate sugar and flour it's good to go!
erika
Friend, I believe a disastrous cake making experience to be a rite of passage in itself. Ah... I remember my own so well... My Women's Weekly 'Best-Ever Sponge Cake' rising ever so beautifully before erupting in a Baby-Sitters-Clubesque-science-project-volcano fashion over the cake tin and all over the oven, smoke alarm going off, concerned neighbours knocking on the door to see if I was OK, and me uttering some rather unladylike phrases for the first time in my (until then) charmed existence.
Like I said, rite of passage.
Want to feel better? Visit...
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/ and see "...professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong"
Ah beloved ones, your self-deprecating stories make the burden a little lighter.
Nicole - where do you come up with these websites?! Char-broiled poo cake??!?!
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