Mad Respect

I have 3 friends that I know of who decorate cakes on a regular basis. I, on the other hand, have designed and decorated exactly two cakes in the past 6 years; one on Kiersta's first birthday and one on Kyle's first birthday. Now that I've done those two, I'm done. I don't know how these 3 lovely ladies do it. All I know is that I have mad respect for their amazing talents.

I'll let my pictures do the talking of my cake making abilities:

I made two cakes. The first was a lemon cake that turned out just fine and didn't require photographic proof, though maybe I should have just to show that I am capable of baking a cake. This is a white cake that didn't like coming out of the pan. A little frosting will hide the problem, right?

So I took one layer of lemon cake and one layer of white cake and cubed them and added frosting between and around. The frosting was going on too thick so I microwaved it and made more of an icing. I still had difficulties. Just so you know, I'm attempting to make a pile of blocks, can't you tell?

I piped on blue decorating icing and that actually gave the cake a little dimension. You can kind of tell that they are blocks, though the blocks may be in the middle of falling down after being kicked over by a deranged baker.

With green icing I decorated each side of the blocks. You can tell they're blocks but they are definitely falling over.

Here's the birthday boy with his cake and his big sister blowing out the candle. Kyle really doesn't look like he know what to make of this monstrosity.

Kyle figured things out. He decided to destroy the cake, well at least the one block we gave him. He looks a bit like a crazed clown in this picture.

Luckily I had ordered a back-up cake from Safeway. Safeway gives a small cake to kids for free on their first birthday with the purchase of a quarter sheet or larger. We were expecting about 45 people for this party and I wanted to make sure I had enough cake to go around. Plus, my husband, Brian, really only eats chocolate cake. He was horrified that my cake did not have a speck of chocolate in it. I ordered a chocolate cake with a fudge center and buttercream frosting. I asked for a blue cake with a block theme (to go with my block cake) since it was a boy's birthday. Here's what they gave me:

That's right a pretty yellow cake with pink icing, pink butterflies, and purple flowers. It just SCREAMS boy cake, doesn't it? I didn't get a picture of the larger cake but it also was pink and yellow and said in pink: "1st Happy Birthday Kyle." About the only thing they got right was the block!

What a bunch of blockheads!