Cake-o-rama

I love to make cakes. When I had kids, of course, I had to start making and decorating birthday cakes for them, usually two a year since we try to have separate parties for friends and family, just to keep the mayhem to manageable levels (otherwise, Mommy has to delve a little *too* deeply into The Drink).

I started out with the usual colorfully-frosted blobs, but once Josie got older and started having Interests, I branched out into the expected Barbie cake for her kid party, and for the family party, a much smaller Kellie cake.

Since that was actually recognizable, I started doing real estate

This year, for Patrick's birthday, I wanted to do something special, that he would remember. He's HUGE into Star Wars, because we have both the original and new series Lego video games and have played them so much that we've actually found all the special stuff and won so many coins that the game has stopped counting! Last year, I made him a Darth Vader cake, which I didn't take a picture of, because it was just hideous and, well, BLACK. Everyone's teeth were really, really nasty after eating it!

Since he loves the bad guys most of all, I decided to make something with Jabba the Hut as a theme this year. I knew I didn't want to make Jabba himself, because that would just be disgusting, so I settled on making his slave ship, the one from the third movie that Luke is almost forced to jump off of into the pit where the sand monster is. After making several layer cakes and cutting them to make layerable sections, frosting it, and using graham crackers, twizzlers and those new chocolate-covered candy bar sticks, I put some lego people on top, and this is what I ended up with:
















Most recently, two weeks ago our church choir director turned 27, and I offered to make the cake for the surprise party we had for him. We always tease him about how much Coke he drinks, which is easily two cans during a 90min rehearsal, so I decided to make him a Coke-themed cake:
















It's a little hard to see, but there are polar bears looking at the bottle, which is made out of trimmed circles of cake laying on their side and frosted together. It's covered with cookie sludge (Oreos mixed with chocolate sauce) and black sugar crystals. The wording says, 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony', from the old commercial, which I thought was apt for a music director.

Sometimes people tell me I should go into business, and I guess I wouldn't mind doing cakes for people I knew, but doing them for strangers would introduce a layer of pressure I'm not sure I'd want. What if they didn't like it? I'd either be upset, or mad. Either way, someone would probably end up with cake where the sun don't shine, and I'd end up needing someone to make ME a cake... with a file baked into it. :)