I’ve been away for a while and I’ve missed The Blog terribly.  I promised myself I’d post this weekend so here I am, with about 5 minutes to spare to keep my promise.  With moving and all that jazz I still managed to do three cakes this week.  One for my son’s 11th birthday, one for a dog’s 1st birthday, and one for my husband’s cousin’s son’s (did you get that?) 2nd birthday.

My son is a video game junkie, so he chose a Nintendo DS as his cake.  That was fine with me since I didn’t have to carve, stack, or work out the physics of anything.  I did, however, have to paint with food coloring, which I’ve never done before.  Now, I can make things out of fondant (its edible Play Dough, which I’ve been playing with since I was three), but drawing is not my thing.  Painting, even less so.  Basically, painting with food coloring is like using watercolors.  Ach.  I grabbed a picture of Sonic (drawn by my #1, who is a FAR better artist than I’ll ever be) and a picture of Mario, Luigi, and the oh-so-lame-Yoshi, who I didn’t realize was oh-so-lame until the next morning when my son saw his cake and said (with disgust), “Why did you put Yoshi on there?!”  Autistic children aren’t known for their tact.

“I put Yoshi on there because I painted Mario and Luigi too far to the left and needed something to fill in all the white space on the right,”  I explained out loud.  To myself, I added “brat” on the end of that sentence.

Anyhoo, here is a picture of the cake.

Here are the close-ups of my fancy artwork.

Sonic the Hedgehog in Food Coloring

Mario, Luigi, and Oh-So-Lame Yoshi in Food Coloring

Yeah, so Luigi has a big butt like my daughter pointed out (8-year-old girls aren’t known for their tact, either) and Mario’s head is HUGE.  I think it’s pretty good for a first try.

The second cake was much better.  Well, I had a less critical client for it, anyway.  It was for a dog’s 1st birthday and no, it wasn’t made of Alpo.  Although it’s a bit out of proportion, I’m sure Max didn’t mind.

The third cake was the most fun and the most challenging.  It was working on this cake that made me truly sorry for some of the things I lost in the fire.  I bought the bare minimum cake supplies I’d need and I was missing the fancy cake levelers and fondant tools.  *Sigh*  I completely underestimated the time I needed to do the cake, too.  I was forced to make my husband’s cousin’s mom (that would be my husband’s aunt, or ex-aunt since she’s divorced from his uncle, or my ex-aunt-in-law.  Got that?)  wait in the car for almost 10 minutes.  I was desperately trying to get florists wire to stick in a cake at the perfect angle and had to stop when Jehovah’s Witnesses rang my front doorbell.  I’m sure they were two very sweet little old ladies but I gave them the politest brush-off I could muster.  At least I didn’t hide in the floor away from the windows like I usually do.  I took The Watchtowers and tossed them in the trash on the way back to my floral wire nightmare.  Anyway, here is the finished cake.

Elmo Birthday Cake

This picture doesn’t do my Elmo justice.  He looked like he’d had one too many drunken nights with the Cookie Monster.

Fat, drunken Elmo

My daughter said, “Elmo looks kind of fat.” Brat. But she was right.  #1 said he was creepy.  Yeah, well you should’ve seen him before he had hair. It was definitely not my best work and I felt really bad about it.  Oh well.  I’m sure the two-year-old was okay with it.

Well, that’s all I have time for now, folks.  I have to pack and my bathroom has flooded with backed up washing machine water, which leaked into the hallway carpet a little bit.  Things have been going so well, something irritating was bound to happen.  I’m just wondering why it had to be the night before I left for vacation.