In those carefree BK (Before Kids) days, I imagined baking cute birthday cakes for future kids. My mom used to make little train cakes with gumdrop windows. The train cars perched on licorice rails with a green coconut base. So cute. I knew it was in my blood.
I bought a puppy cake mold before I had kids. My first cake using that mold was a pile of crumbs that I shaped like the foothills of Colorado. Drizzling icing on top was supposed to mimic snow. I hoped nobody would notice because I didn’t have time to bake another cake.
One first-birthday cake was supposed to be a bright soccer ball but looked more like an egg that had fallen from the second floor.
Before Pinterest Fails were a thing, my cakes were trailblazing the way.
As some of the kids got older, they didn’t ask me for cake decorating advice. They invested time in 4-H cake decorating units. Kids can be wise sometimes.
One daughter learned how to decorate a one-layer cake for her first project.
She baked her show cake the afternoon before it had to be entered at the county fair. When the edge of the cake wouldn’t release from the pan, she solved the problem by cutting away the perimeter.
Most of the entered cakes were 8” round, but hers was more of a 5” lumpy. She slathered on icing, but it was like trying to hide Mount Everest under an ice cream cone. No champion ribbon that year.
Another daughter was the creative sort who felt stifled by the rules for the unit. When she was required to form a mat of frosting stars, she didn’t understand why the cake couldn’t show through. It would be like hiding the tuba in the marching band.
No blue ribbon that year, either.
Our son, at age 10, signed up to learn cake decorating and even went to a workshop where he and 25 girls learned the fine art of placing dots of frosting on waxed paper. This, of course, made no sense to him until he licked clean the frosting after the workshop.
We found out later that he signed up so that he could be in charge of the family birthday cakes. He figured if he’d finished cake decorating, I’d let him make the cakes.
Maybe to up his game with the frosting. Many family birthday cakes had a finger lick on the side before we got to the candles.
I never caught him in the act, but I suspect this had been a goal for his life since he was four.
His show cake came together on a hot summer day with frosting that needed a lot more sugar than he put in the bowl. Imagine a lava flow sliding across his design.
The lava-icing flow continued until he got the cake to the fairgrounds. His frosting border was supposed to be a circle but resembled the outline of Texas.
No blue ribbon that time either.
But his father bought back the cake, took it home, and served it to our family. Oh, yeah, everybody ate a piece.
We haven’t had any cute train cakes in our house, but one good thing has come from all this cake-decorating training: along as there is plenty of frosting, our family is content with a pile of cake crumbs.
