grav_ity | Family and Cake

The Miami Project has discovered Hide and Seek. You play like this:

1. Put a blanket on The Miami Project's head and declare loudly "Where's [The Miami Project]?", "I can't find [The Miami Project]!" etc.
2. Continue until YOU, the GROWN UP, get bored.
3. Pull the blanket off and yell "THERE HE IS!".
4. Tacklehuggiggle.

Seriously. As soon as you put the blanket over him, he FREEZES and won't move again until you reach step 3. The Sister's taken to playing it with him on the Go Train, and it usually has the entire car in stitches.

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Okay, so in that Five Things meme, all three people asked me about cake. It's kind of a weird story.

When I was a kid, I loved to bake. It's how I learned to count, add and divide. When my friends all got EasyBake ovens, I was upset because I didn't get one too. I asked my mum for one, and she was all "The real oven is RIGHT THERE. Just don't burn the house down." I was six.

Mum always made our birthday cakes when we were little. Pizzas, gardens, castles, bicycles, swimming pools...they mostly relied on candy for decoration. They weren't pretty or artistic, really, but they were kid-friendly and tasted really good. That's sort of my thing with kids' cakes.

Then I went to University and lived without an oven for five years. Baking sort of stopped until I was at Chapters and it was getting down to the end of January. My friend was turning 25 and we were going bowling. As I was the only one who would be passing a grocery store, I volunteered to stop and pick up a cake, but when I told mum, she was all "Store cakes? I'll make one and you can decorate it."

Thus was born the Bowling Alley Cake. It was chocolate (all of my cakes are chocolate, unless I can't avoid it), and iced with cream cheese icing dyed yellow, the more to look like a shiney wooden floor. I used Kit Kats to separate the lanes, Mike and Ikes for the pins and gumballs for the balls. The best part of the whole thing was the ball rack, which was a bunch of gumballs iced onto Kit Kats...but it looked cool.

After that, Casey and I were standing in the Book Store one day, discussing how we should totally make cupcakes for Valentine's Day. Rachel, bless her FOREVER, interrupted us to ask if she could come over too (for the record, this is my first Real Memory of Rachel, as I do not remember her AT ALL from any pre-Christmas madness), and we of course said yes. When Rachel showed up and revealed her plethora of icing bag heads, Casey and I realized she meant business, and that we were probably out of our league...but the dream was born.

The next stage was the book Hello Cupcake!, which one of the boys pulled out of receiving for us. Hello Cupcake approaches cupcakes the way I do: candy first. The cupcakes all look SUPER complicated and are all actually REALLY EASY. We fell in love with the Corn on the Cupcakes, but decided to wait until Corn Season to actually do it for full effect.

However, I was itching to make a cake, and since Indianna Jones had the good sense to come out just in time for my birthday, I decided to make the Indiana Jones Hat Cake. This was mostly a series of happy accidents I solved by adding more chocolate icing, but the overall effect was REALLY AWESOME and I had a blast.

Rachel and I finally made Corn on the Cupcakes in August for my father's birthday cake. They were greeted with much success by everyone who saw them, and they deserved it, because they are FREAKING AWESOME. Cupcakes are perfect because if you screw one up, it's not the end of the world, and also they are a bit easier to manhandle then a cake.

Korea, the long, dark cakeless tea time of my soul, was bereft of most baking endeavours. I would look at the cakes in the shops and marvel that something so cool looking could taste so bad. Even their ICE CREAM cakes weren't right...and they came from Baskin Robbins! Rachel and I are in agreement that cakes must taste good, and that taste should not be compromised for looks, so Korea was hard on me. :)

I came home just *dying* to bake something, and was greeted with an opportunity twice in the same week! My cousin had a birthday, and he loves the Wii, so I found a Wii cake online and adapted it to fit my taste/appearance requirements (the original cake, a Martha Stewart, was inedible and the second one used fondant). The Result was very well receiving, and I am wondering if I'll be asked to make another one next month for the other cousin! I wouldn't really mind at all! The Wii Cake was my first cake that require support (I used dowels because it was four stories high), and the whole thing was a bit of a disaster, in my opinion, but still fun and tasty.

And then I went to OB Wan's house on Monday and on Tuesday morning he yelled "Hey, can you back something for the Make-a-Wish bake sale my RAs are having tonight?" and I went ahead and did.

They don't look exactly like the book (and it this book, they actually do look just like the book, see the Corn pictures), but it was fun. And I totally showed up everyone else at the bake sale. They sold four of them before I had time to leave the foyer, and by the time I went home 20 minutes later, they were sold out!

The Basics: chocolate cupcake, plain old-fashioned Timbits, mini-marshmallows, regular marshmallows, and yellow or orange Starbursts cut into triangles.

Me, hard at work. I asked OB Wan to take pictures as I was by this point COVERED in black icing dye. He didn't really take a) a lot of pictures and b) pictures where you can see what I am doing/have done in detail, but in his defense, he didn't realy know.

ALL DONE! Unfortunately, OB Wan was a bit shakey, but you get the idea! Aren't they cute enough to eat? :)

This is my tongue after two hours of exposure to black icing! I still have cuts on my hands I can't wash it out of!

On the horizon, there are more birthdays and then in May my own. And I have a plan. ;)