Birthday Monster Mash-Up

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:

Happy Birthday, my special little guy!