End of Year Musings Week 4 – Something New

Monday, Dec 19: Something New
Knitting, a new language, underwater basketweaving… what new things did you learn this year? 

This year, I started making cakes for the kids’ parties. It’s not even close to looking professional. There’s no fondant involved, but it’s fun, and the kids will remember these.

Cake for Clooney's First Holy Communion

Clooney’s really into cars, so when it came to putting together this cake, the idea just kind of came to me…blasphemous as it may have been. The strip of road on top was made from the part of the cake that I had to slice from the bottom to make it even. It was devil’s food on the inside just to make sure I had my foot planted firmly on the road to Hell.

This is a Golden Snitch, which is a Harry Potter Quidditch thing, if you are not hip to wizard lingo.

For his 11th birthday, Edison wanted to go all Hogwarts, and we had quite an elaborate party. I did a couple of practice rounds of these cake pops before the final product. They were devil’s food on the inside as well. The wings were made of melted white chocolate that I piped out onto wax paper before applying to the pop.

The Wicked Witch of the West spelled out The Princess's name with her broom there as well. The sign was made on cardboard, and held up with chopsticks that I "borrowed" from PF Chang. I might also note that this cake weighed 14,000 pounds.

And then there was The Princess’s Wizard of Oz-themed party. (Quite a year of wizards for us over here.) The inside of the cake had layers that were the colors of the rainbow (or as close to the colors of the rainbow as I could get without putting our party guests into a food-dye-induced coma.)

For each cake, I just kind of used my imagination along with a lot of humor, patience, and icing. I’ve never taken any kind of decorating class, and I don’t claim to be Martha Stewart or anything. (And I think if Martha saw these, she would breathe a sigh of relief on that note.) Like I said, it was fun to make them, and I hope to do more cakes for the kids in 2012.