A Piece of Cake.

In my family, I don't need to bake birthday cakes. We have Auntie Sarah.

There was once when I decided that I wanted to do it myself. I can't remember if Sarah was travelling or just humouring me. In any event, it was Sheldon's 6th birthday and the theme was Lego. So I baked him a slab cake with upside down cupcakes on top and then I iced it all in 'lego blue'. I thought it was a masterpiece. He thought it was a castle.

Crushed, I decided that I would never bake another cake. Ever.

But then Sarah went to Cambodia and left me with the task of cakes. Shamelessly, I've relied on the grocery store to add the kid's names to their cakes because the idea of actually baking scares me.

Lately I've been reflecting on the great parties that I used to throw for Sheldon's birthdays - big themes from beginning to end with every last detail covered. Poor Juliana. By her birthday in November it is too close to Christmas and I am just too darned tired to throw much of a party. She loses every year.

So when she asked if she could have an end of school party this year I figured, why not? And then we started planning.

I made fruit balls in a watermelon bowl, added granola bars, and called it an after school snack. She wanted to play soccer so we did. There was a dance party in the basement and then we all sat down and shared our thoughts about the last day of school and our plans for the summer. We had hot dogs and more junk food for dinner. We wrote our secrets on balloons and then released them to the skies. We had a pinata. (That's a whole story on it's own. Suffice it to say that they had a great time whacking the crap out of it for 45 minutes but my candy selection was left in a candy dust by the time it was set free. Oops.)

But most exciting to me: we had cake.

I was inspired by a fellow blogger's cake and decided to revisit the whole cake-baking thing.

Truthfully, when I showed the pictures of her cake to a very dear friend and told her that I was thinking of making one she said "um......yeah....you could make that cake...." (In her defence - in the 16 years that I've known her I've never made anything that has instructions that fill more than one side of a recipe card.) When I showed Peter the picture and asked him how hard he thought it would be, he replied ".....for...you?"

Huh. I'll take that challenge.

So, with my mother by my side (typically I get frustrated, start to cry, and she finishes my tasks) I gathered all the gear I needed and got down to business.


I think that Sarah would be proud. I had a couple of little icing glitchs but, all told, it was a smashing success. I wish that I could have captured the kids faces when I sliced into my multi-layer goodness. But I can share a couple of sound bytes:

"Wow. You could make professional cakes!"

"You're lucky Juliana!"

"You could be on Cake Boss!"

And my personal favourite: "You should be in the Cake Olympics!"

All in all, I've enjoyed my dabble in cake-world. I might even try it again sometime, but really, this is Auntie Sarah's job. And she can have it back anytime she'd like.