Cake Walk

In our family a birthday cake must be home-made, not one of those fancy-shmancy store-bought ones, or else it means your mother doesn't love you enough to go to all that work. (It may be that I started this  practice because I was too cheap---or broke---to buy the bakery kind but I'm not going to admit that now.)

I'm not sure that my daughters-in-law would thank me for this tradition, but they do go along with it, with some stunning results, I might add.  Over the years I've seen, among others, kitten cup cakes with licorice whiskers and chocolate-kisses---ears painstakingly carved by a real surgeon, an Elmo cake so real looking it made you think you were hearing that obnoxious "Elmo's World" song in the background, and a charming Cinderella wearing a huge hoop-skirted ball gown, although poor Cinderella had to sacrifice her legs to fit into the gown, but no one knew that till the cake was being eaten.

My efforts at theme cakes may have been a little less, shall we say, recognizable than my talented daughters-in law's. Like the time I wanted to make a computer cake for Josh. I baked it in two loaf pans, laid one flat on the platter and stood the other on it's end at the back of that layer. A little frosting, some candy letters that spelled Josh's name on the "monitor" and---voila!--- a computer. Perhaps everyone didn't have the vision to see it. I heard one of Josh's friends whisper to him, "Josh, why did your mom make a tombstone for your cake?"

A few years ago when Jake's wife, Robyn, was having a birthday and her whole extended family was coming to town to celebrate, I volunteered to make the cake.  I knew better than to try a theme cake, but since it was going to be a crowd---Robyn's aunt even drove all the way from Dallas---I thought it should be big. And impressive. (I have heard rumors that Robyn's opinion of my cooking skills is not too high.) I decided to dazzle them all.

A white cake should be easy, I thought, with chocolate icing. Simple but elegant.Three layers ought to do it. I gave up trying to figure out the math to make three layers instead of two or four, so I doubled the recipe and put a little extra batter in the three cake pans. This, for some reason, made the baking time a little confusing, and by the time I had opened the oven five times and stuck a toothpick in the cakes to see if they were done I was running a little late so I might have hurried things a little.  The cakes may have been a little too warm when I started frosting them. They wouldn't stay in their 3-layer stack! I had to keep pushing them back in place. I made more frosting, building up the valleys in between layers. The cake got to be quite tall.  It kind of resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Italy was NOT my theme..

Then I remembered a trick I had seen my sister use to hold layers together. She used long skewers, inserted them in the cake and frosted over them. Now, I didn't have any long skewers but not to worry, I did have spaghetti noodles. They were just the right length although it took about a dozen to hold the cake together.

Very slowly, I slid the cake onto a cookie sheet for safe carrying, very slowly slid it onto the floorboard of the car and very slowly drove over to their house. It isn't even a mile to Jake and Robyn's house; it is in our neighborhood.  You would have thought a cake could make it that far without leaning, especially secured with almost a whole serving of spaghetti noodles! Who knew that once the noodles hit that moist cake (my cakes are always moist, thank you!) they would get kind of limp?

 I slowly slid the cookie sheet with the cake out of the floorboard of my car and slowly walked up to the door. Presentation is everything, so since the cake was leaning about 30 degrees to the right, I leaned about 30 degrees to the left. Nobody mentioned that I was listing. They probably didn't notice since they seemed to be stunned by the yummy looking, very tall cake

The candles were lit, we sang Happy Birthday and everybody crunched into the cake.  Did I say "Crunched"? I meant dug. They all dug into the cake. Maybe all of the noodles hadn't succumbed to the moistness yet. There was plenty of frosting though.

I'm pretty sure they knew that it wasn't some fancy cake from a bakery.