Voila! Le Gateau!

Oh my gosh! It's done! This was seriously a marathon in cake making. It was fun, but I put a lot of pressure on myself. I feel like I've accomplished something. I'm productive and capable! I would say this badboy took me about 10 hours to make over the course of a week. See? I told you I lost my mind. Ah!

Here's the progress of the cake (minus the cake and frosting making part, pretty boring, so I'm skipping to the juicy parts):

Oval Cake with a notch cut out for the small round cake

Cutting the second oval for the wings

I goofed on the shape of the wing so I needed to add an extra piece for the other wing

Chocolate frosting in between all the layers

Crumb coat, kind of melty in the heat, continued to frost the next day

Finished cake at the restaurant!

My sad attempt at a sunflower for Alex's smash cake. Too melty!

Interested....

Diving in (almost frozen from the restaurant's fridge)

CAAAAAAAAAKE!

Lessons learned:

• It was easier than I thought it would be (the planning helped)
• Cake batter from scratch is way tastier than any cake mix batter (um, not that I eat cake batter)
• Butter makes everything better
• Frosting can cover all sorts of mistakes, screw something up? Slap more frosting on the problem
• I had carefully measured that the cake would fit in the cake caddy. Then I frosted the cake and didn't account for the extra girth (see above lesson)
• I need a bigger fridge
• Popping the cake back in the fridge during this heat wave was a neccessity

More about the party next time...Must go to bed, no more cake making until midnight.

Almost done! (otherwise known as Martha Stewart stole my brain)

So I got it into my pea brain that I wanted to make a fun cake for Alex's birthday. Nothing commercial, he's too young for Lighting McQueen or even Elmo (I hope he never does get into that kind of thing!). I chose a bee because of his bee hat. that I loved so much I bought it in the next size up too. The mascot of our university is a bee (Go Stingers!). Yeah, we're dorks.

So I've been planning out this cake, getting cake decorating tools, made a test cake (never buy baking soda from a corner store) and have been watching youtube videos on cake decorating. Did I mention I'm a planner? I even got my husband in on it. He used his professional engineering software to come up with a plan for the cake based on the pans I have and the cake carrier it's going in.

He asked if I wanted a finite element analysis on the cake. Umm, noooo, that would be ridiculous!

So I've been slowly working on the cake for almost a week. Baked one layer, then another day baked the second. My freezer is filled with cake parts. Made the chocolate frosting on Thursday and the vanilla frosting this morning.

I just want to make a nice cake and not have it look like this:

But it doesn't need to be as fancy as this cake I like to call the Louis Beeton:

I found this image that matches perfectly the shape of the cake I'm going for (see above engineered bee shape):

This is doable...I think.

Next up, cake assembly and decorating. I feel like I've been studying for a history final. I know my material, it's just not my strongest subject.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to?

Oh who knew a first birthday party could be so stressful! Some family and a naked baby eating cake right? Sigh, if it were only that easy. My mother-in-law insists on holding birthdays parties for everyone in the family, which up until recently was mostly adults (Alex's youngest cousin on that side is 20 years old), sitting around, some gifts, mosrly gift cards, cake and Coke (no tea or coffee, only soda). This to me is not a party. Twelve times a year, this would occur for everyone's birthday.

Now the problem is, my MIL expects me to do the same for Alex. I want something a little more special for him. Problem #2 is lack of space; my tiny apartment can't hold more than 4 adults. I want to have a party in the park near our house. My MIL seems to think it's "too risky to have something outside", yet she suggested having the party "up at the country". The country being a trailer park where she spends her summers, next to a busy road, where the locals include drunken old guys and plump, leather skinned ladies padding around in gold bikinis and swampy water you can't swim in.  Uh, yeah, no thanks.

I'm thinking a small something on the day of, and then she can have whatever hoopla she wants at her house. It bites that I can't have the party I want for him....I know I know, he won't remember it anyway.

Alex loves the cats,

 maybe I can make him a nice Kitty Litter Cake

Or nothing says first birthday like a Chuck Norris cake

Or a Zombie Kiwi Robot Cake?