Cake Decorating for Dummies

The Little Ninja turned 10 last week, and since his party was on Saturday, of course I went looking for a cake on Friday morning.

There wasn’t a decent cake to be found. And since there was no way I was going to get a generic grocery store shit sheet cake for my baby, I decided I would just make him something myself.

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty good cook. And I can certainly follow a recipe. But I don’t make many fancy desserts because I don’t really eat a lot of sweets. I do make the occasional cake and cookies for the kids, so I thought to myself,

How hard can it be?

But what to make?

I looked at The Little Ninja’s birthday list…

Longboard

Ramune

Ninjago

Money

1. A longboard
2. Japanese Ramune soda
3. Ninjago Legos
4. Money

… and the obvious thing to do was make a LEGO Cake.

I looked on Pinterest….. and found a video that made the cake look easy. I thought, 

I can do this!

The store didn’t have the creamy icing called for in the recipe, so I got the whipped creamy icing. I’m thinking maybe that was the first mistake.

I baked the cake, cooled it for 10 minutes or so, and then encountered the first problem:

when I turned it out onto the rack to finish cooling, part of the bottom stuck to the pan. I scraped it up with a spatula and reattached it to the cake as best I could. Then I stashed it in the fridge.

After a while, I cut the cake into blocks, and put the first coat of icing on it (the  “crumb coat”) There were lots of crumbs, as you can see on the sides.

I stashed the blocks back in the fridge, as directed. This step is apparently supposed to allow the icing to harden a bit, so the next coat goes on smoothly and flawlessly.

After another while, I iced it a second time. The crumbs were still a problem, probably because I had bought the whipped icing. And the marshmallows were kind of hard to frost, too. I just couldn’t manage to get the bloody icing to smooth out!

I hid everything back in the fridge.

Saturday morning I came up with the brilliant idea of hiding all the icing imperfections (and crumbs) with sprinkles! I assembled the LEGO blocks and strategically placed the sprinkles. (I didn’t want it to look obvious, never mind that we’re talking about 10-year-olds.)

After bowling and before laser tag and arcade games, the cake came out.

All the kids yelled,

CAKE!!

They devoured it. The Little Ninja had no idea it was supposed to be LEGOs.

Next year, you can bet I’ll be ordering a cake.