Tomorrow is the girl child's 7th birthday. (I am old.) We celebrated yesterday by mini-golfing with my parents and then going to a local restaurant for lunch and a slab of ice cream cake as large as a house. Today she and I (and the neighbor girls) planned to bake the most fantastic birthday cake. I am generally a believer in doing everything from scratch, but I've recently begun biking for exercise again and that makes me lazy in every other area of my life, so we made (hold onto yourselves) boxed cakes. I have been seeing cool pictures on Pinterest of ombre-colored cakes in which the layers are varying shades of green or whatever. Child is all about anything being rainbow colored, so I split two prepared box mixes into 4 cereal bowls and added enough food coloring to each bowl to make the chemist and mother in me shudder. Each bowl went into it's own separate 8-inch round pan so we ended up with teal, purple, dark pink, and orange cake layers.
Everything was great up to this point. I forgot to grease the pans, but the cakes came out alright. I let them cool. I made buttercream frosting from scratch (using 2 pounds of powdered sugar, holy crap) and dyed it a lovely hot pink color (involuntary twitch). What's that you say? "Wow, this seems to be going pretty well so far, despite the fact that your child should be taken away from you for your use of box cake mixes and synthetic food dyes." Oh, don't you worry. Things began to go horribly awry starting...now.
First, while the cakes were cooling on large sheet pans on the kitchen table, the stupid butter-loving cat kept trying to eat them. (Please see previous entries on what other stupid things my large cat likes to eat.) To prevent this, I covered the cakes with clean flour-sack towels. Usually he's an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" kind of cat. Apparently today he was an "out-of-sight-so-that-must-mean-I-can-walk-on-it" kind of cat. I came upstairs from doing one load of laundry to cries and screams from the three girls about how the cat had "ruined the birthday cake" and to find girl child with the cat in some kind of upside down half-nelson. Really, thanks to the towels, the cakes were not ruined. They just had tiny cat-foot sized holes in each one. (Seriously, every single one. They were set up in a square formation. I think the cat was trying to play Dance Dance Revolution on the birthday cakes.) No biggie, I calmed the girls down, moved the cakes, and carried on with the day.
The second problem, in hindsight, probably started when I got all "I know I'm supposed to cut the round tops off so the cakes are flat and I should probably cut the edges off too, but fuck it! I'm so awesome that nothing could possibly go wrong here! They're all the same shape and size...I'll just spread extra frosting in between the layers so that they stick together. It will be fine!" (The laziness. I have it bad.)
The third problem is that I fricking suck at frosting cakes. Actually, I suck at decorating anything, unless the goal is to make it as ugly as possible. Leading us to today's picture shenanigan:
Behold! The ugliest fucking birthday cake ever created!
The back half of the cake is pretty much gone...it gradually avalanched onto the kitchen table while I was trying to frost it. I finally just gave up and tried to make the front as nice as possible. Yes, this is my best cake-frosting job. Thankfully, little girls don't care what a cake looks like, as long as it tastes good and you let them put an obscene amount of sprinkles on it.
The caved-in back side of the frankencake, in case you thought I was exaggerating.
The layers are kind of cool at least.
Next year I'm buying a goddamn ice cream cake.
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