New #7: Bake a Fancy Cake

Last week was Ben's birthday, and to get in the spirit of things (and to knock out a new) I decided to bake him a cake. I'm not much of a cook (see New #2), and baking has never been a strong suite, either. But despite my culinary concerns, I wasn't going to settle for an average sheet cake. No, no. This cake was going to be shaped like a fish - a colorful, frosted, lemon flavored, delicious fish.

Like any architect does before constructing a masterpiece, I designed some blue prints of my cake before getting started. Maybe they weren't so much blue prints as sketches on the back of an envelope. But I just needed some idea of what I was doing. There was a lot to figure out. At first I thought about baking a rectangle cake and cutting out the swimmer's shape. But after some advice from friends, I decided to use two round cakes: the first for the body and the rest for fins and tail.

Thankfully, the baking part was easy. But sure enough, my cooking curse soon struck again and the cakes wouldn't come out of the pans. When they final did, everything was left falling apart and kinda crumbly. Not the perfect pieces I'd planned to sculpt. I was able to trace the general outlines I was going for, like the tail and fins. Then I just moved the crumbles into these loosely shaped piles around the body. At this point, my cake was looking more like chum than a fish. That is, until I discovered the sweetest godsend in cake decorating: frosting.

The halfway point of the cake: a crumbly outline of a fish.

Not only does frosting paste everything together like glue, but it makes it all look amazing and taste delicious. Right away I was able to brush over all the crumbles and cracks, making my cake appear like it was actually connected. No one had to know beauty really was only skin (or frosting) deep. And boy my fish was fabulous. With my color selections, one might even call him flamboyant.

I used food dye to create a few different frosting colors, although they turned out much more pastel than I'd planned. Actually, midway through my frosting, the birthday fish started looking more like an Easter flounder. By the time I painted on his purple lips he seemed to be screaming for help. Oh well. So what if he wasn't the manly catch I was going for? Ben still loved it all the same.


In fact, I think the birthday boy was thoroughly impressed by my creation. He didn't mind digging right in and eating it, either. Actually, I really liked that part of the project. Other crafts are fun to make, but then you're stuck with a painted box or crocheted pot holder that you throw in a drawer because you feel too attached to throw it away. But baking cakes is the perfect way to get creative without the long-term commitment. Not only are cakes made to be gobbled up, but you can even eat most of the supplies along the way. That's my kind of hobby.

The birthday boy and his cake.