Cake or Death?

"Um, cake please."
(If you are not familiar with Eddie Izzard that quote will make no sense to you, and that is unfortunate.)

So I have this compulsive need to make huge birthday cakes for my son.  It began with his second birthday, mostly out of guilt, because his first birthday was such a disaster in my memory.  His first birthday was right in the middle of my divorce, when I was complete wreck, and I did not feel like I had time to make a good enough cake, so I made a deal with my ex husband that I would buy cute decorations if he would buy him a cute cake. For whatever reason, he didn't end up getting the cake, and his Aunt Wendy ended up making one last minute, and I felt incredibly guilty for not just making him one myself.  Ryan was also pretty sick on his birthday, and with that plus the palpable tension in the room, it wasn't exactly what I imagined for my baby's very first birthday. So when his second birthday rolled around a year later, I spent several hours making him a "Cars" themed cake and pulled off a very happy, fun birthday party for him.

 When his third birthday came, he asked for a Handy Manny cake.  By this point I had gotten over the guilt and decided I just wanted the over-the-top cakes to become a tradition that he could look back on fondly as an adult someday.  So Pete and I stayed up all night and into the wee hours of the morning trying to make a Handy Manny Toolbox cake.  We encountered several problems along the way, but making the tools out of sugar cookie dough was pretty fun.  In the end the cookies ended up being way too heavy for the cake, so the whole thing turned out pretty wonky and lopsided, but at least the tools were cute.

 For Birthday #4, the theme was Toy Story, and I found some awesome pictures online that inspired me to try to make fondant for the first time.  It was incredibly time-consuming to make the fondant and learn how to work with it, and I'm pretty sure we ran out of frosting or marshmallows at some point requiring a late night trip to Wal Mart, so of course it took all night yet again.  Then when we realized we didn't have enough fondant to cover the bottom tier, Pete had to run to the store again to find something to put around the bottom. Chocolate covered wafers to the rescue!   In the end, this cake was my absolute favorite and still is to this day.  It turned out almost exactly as I imagined, and Ryan LOVED it. We only got a couple of hours of sleep that night, but it was worth it.

Ryan's 5th birthday was a special one.  He had started asking to go to Disneyland sometime when he was 4, and as we knew we couldn't afford it nor did we have time while I was in school, Pete and I decided we would try to make a trip to California for my graduation "present" in 2012.  So for many months we kept pacifying Ryan by telling him he couldn't go to Disneyland until he was 5.  As more time went on we realized that making the trip after my graduation was a bad idea (we knew we were going to be moving out of state), so we found a way to plan the Disneyland trip for December 2011.  The trip became Ryan's birthday present once we found a way to plan it so that we would actually get on the plane to CA right after his birthday party.  We kept it a secret, so I "suggested" to Ryan that he have a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse themed birthday party.  Luckily he went for it, and we went all-out to have a Mickey themed party that would tie in perfectly to his big gift.  I found ideas online for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse shaped cakes, and decided to try it.  It turned out much more difficult than we imagined.  We had to deal with fondant problems, structural issues and food-coloring nightmares, plus we had to make a ton of cake and rice crispie treats for Mickey's head, neck and foot.  So once again, we stayed up all night (I think we got about three hours of sleep), we destroyed our kitchen and cursed about how we would never do fondant again, and this was the result.

I really was serious about giving up on fondant, and I also wanted to give up on the tiered cakes for a while.  And for this year, birthday #6, I had to factor in the reality of being eight months pregnant when planning his birthday.  We decided to spring for a party at Chuck-E-Cheese so that I wouldn't have to stress about planning or set-up and clean-up, but I still had the cake to deal with.  Yes, I did consider just buying one, but that would be breaking tradition, and I couldn't sit well with the idea of him looking back and knowing the year I broke tradition was the year I was pregnant with his sister, especially considering he has had to sacrifice a LOT of time, activities and special things with me due to how sick I have been with this baby. I also couldn't live with myself knowing I copped out on the year Ryan chose Star Wars, since I love Star Wars so very much. So sick and tired or not, I was going to make a fabulous cake, but I tried to find a way to downscale the design a bit from what I might normally attempt.

I borrowed a cake mold from a friend in the shape of Darth Vader's head, so I decided I would just make a big square cake to put the head on and only cover the square in fondant (because it would look so much better than frosting.)  How hard could covering one square really be?  Plus we decided to use food coloring spray-paint instead of coloring the fondant itself, in a effort to make it as simple as possible.  Pete took on the responsibility of making the fondant one day ahead and baking all the cakes early on Friday so that all I would really have to worry about was icing Vader's head and decorating the two "climate corners" of Degobah and Tatooine.  But of course it did not turn out as simple as we had planned.  The cake baking took much longer than expected because one of the cakes did not pop out of the pan and needed to be remade, and we ran out of frosting when assembling the big square.  By the time Pete had to leave for work at 7:30 pm on Friday night, we had finally taken six cakes and made them into one fondant covered base.

All I had to do was spray paint it black, put little white fondant balls all over it to look like stars in space, and then I could move on to decorating and maybe get to bed before midnight.  That plan all went out the window when the stupid spray paint food coloring turned out purple instead of black.  I used two cans, hoping it would get darker if I put more on, but it ended up looking awful. I had a can of black spinkles, so I thought maybe it would look more black if I covered the cake with them. Worst idea ever.  It looked even worse after the sprinkles, and they would only stick to the top and not the sides.  After trying not to cry, I decided to try and take the fondant off the cake and just frost it.  But the cake started falling apart when I took off the first corner, so I put it back and was left with an ugly purple cake and a cracked, ruined corner.

After an hour of brainstorming with Pete online, the only solution we could come up with was to cover the whole thing in black frosting.  But I did not have enough food coloring or powdered sugar to do that plus Vader's head.  And I had no car.  So I called my friend Cherie and she offered to take me to the store with her.  Poor Ryan had to go with us even though it was past his bedtime and he was super tired, but he was a trooper and  we made it back home by 11:30 pm. Cherie scraped all the sprinkles off (which fell to the floor and stained the bottom of our feet) while I ate a burrito, then we made a giant batch of frosting and tinted it black.  She went home and I finally started covering the cake at 12:30 am.  I finished a little after 5:00 am and Pete came home at 5:30 to find his kitchen destroyed, his pregnant wife scrubbing the bottom of her feet, and the finished product (minus the stars because they would not stick to the icing):

People ask me every year why I don't do this for other people and make money for it.  I think this post sums up the reason why I always answer "I would have to charge $500 to make it worth it."  I do this ridiculous up-all-night song and dance once a year for only two reasons:  1) it is incredibly time consuming, frustrating, and messy; and 2) my little Bug's smile when he sees his cake always makes it worth it.  So no, I don't do it as a business, and no, I am not ready to have to do it twice a year after Baby K gets here.  But there is a part of me that still does it for Ryan every year and loves to do it, because I know he will someday cherish the memories of his cakes and the effort put into them.  And that makes my heart smile.  

This face is what it's all about. <3