What the Focus

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

A longboard
Japanese Ramune soda
Ninjago Legos
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.

Beautiful Mallorca

We visited the Spanish island of Mallorca the summer before last. It is the largest of the Balearic Islands, in the Mediterranean Sea. None of us knew what to expect, except G, who has been there several times. Apparently, it is a popular destination for Germans.

We flew on a charter plane from Dortmund, after picking up G’s little tow heads in Bremke…

Pre-flight in Dortmund Airport

The trip over was quick. From the airport we made our way to the car rental agency, where we spent a couple of hours. We immediately set our clocks to “island time”…because it was soon obvious that no one is in a hurry there. The long wait was made interesting by the unfortunate robbery of a single lady who left her laptop and pouch with passport and money on the front seat of her rental car just outside the office while she ran in, and poof, it all disappeared! After that, we made sure to keep a close eye on our belongings.

Once we were all loaded in our van, we headed down the coast to where we had rented a house for the week. We lucked out:

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We enjoyed the house so much, we spent a lot of time at home. The only thing we didn’t enjoy was the daily 5 AM wakeup call courtesy of the resident rooster. But the kids had fun chasing the chicks…

Some days we did manage to venture out for food…

Paella

We drank a lot of this!

And we played tourist one day and drove back to Palma, the capital, to sight see.

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On the way back G showed us the monastery perched at the top of a steep hill. It was rather austere, but there were sweeping views of the coastline. Lucky monks!