Thinking of next year's party theme gives me anxiety

My apologies to all of you out there who check my blog religiously each day, waiting and hoping for an updated post.

Because I totally know that 'all of you' includes my mother and my sister Abby.

So, Mom, since you still haven't joined the year 2010 and have yet to obtain a Facebook account, you have no idea what Zoey's birthday cake looked like last week, a fact we simply must change. And for all of you who do have access to modern internet (i.e. Facebook) and have seen the photos, well, trust me...you haven't seen them all. What follows is the Greatest Birthday Cake Saga ever.

See, I knew I set the bar high with those freaking owl cupcakes back in 2008. It's hard to top those, mainly because they appear adorable and time-consuming, and are actually quite simple to put together. 2009 brought tonsilitis and a pass on my date with the horse-shaped cake pan. And, with 2010 came Zoey's fascination with Disney princesses, namely Cinderella, so you know I wasn't passing up the opportunity to create a Cinderella cake.

A Google search weeks in advance gave me the misguided genius idea to create a Barbie cake. You know, those cakes with a Barbie doll surrounded by a flowing skirt made out of cake. Two 9-inch cakes are stacked on top of each other, topped by a cake baked in a Pyrex bowl and flipped upside down, a two-inch circle is cut from the middle, a Barbie doll with her nether regions wrapped in Saran Wrap is plunked in the middle, and voila. Happy Birthday, princess lover.

Further Google searching led me to my nearest Toys R Us, where I was able to find an actual Cinderella doll instead of a sub-standard Barbie look alike. This, as it turns out, was all the luck I had in putting together this godforsaken cake, but I didn't know it at the time.

A dry run of the bowl-cake a week ahead of time (because, really, CAN you bake a cake in a Pyrex bowl seemed like a question best tested well in advance, as opposed to the night before the party) and it turns out you can, in fact, pull it off, if you pay very close attention to measurements and don't use a bowl a half-inch smaller in diameter than recommended by the recipe. No matter. So we had to scrape plenty of baked-on cake batter from the bottom of the oven. Live and learn.


My sister kindly offered to bake the bowl cake and two 9-inchers the Thursday before the party, as Zoey's and my social calendar suddenly filled to capacity and I was left thinking I'd be up until 2 a.m. Friday night baking cakes.


Upon getting the three cakes home and stacking them up next to Cinderella, I was dismayed to find the height of the cake hit her right about mid-thigh. Closer scrutiny of the recipe actually revealed THREE 9-inch cakes were required.

A panicked call to Grandma later, we had arrangements for additional cakes to be baked while I was at work Friday. And a gentle suggestion to consider a Costco cake for next year.

*Pfffft*

Friday night, and we finally had the desired height for Cinderella's dress. I thought I had this thing in the bag. This was hours before attempting to actually FROST the beast.

The picture doesn't do it justice, people. This is only layer #1, which had to be trimmed to the precise size of the awaiting bowl-cake-layer, and the amount of crumbs clinging stubbornly to the frosting were quickly dooming this entire project to the Cake Wrecks website.

Layers two and three didn't accept their frosting plaster any more graciously than layer one. It was ugly. Like, Cinderella's-wicked-stepsister-ugly.

As my kid wasn't about to have the ugliest birthday cake on record, I consulted the recipe yet again. The recipe that, I swear, is like watching your favorite movie over and over again--each time you see it, you catch something you never saw before. This time around, I caught the paragraph that recommended getting a 'base layer' of frosting around the entire assembled cake, then freezing the entire monstrosity for 30 minutes before polishing it off with a final layer of frosting that would, apparently, gloss over all those wayward ugly crumbs.

I had to sacrifice a box of popsicles and a bag of frozen peas, but I managed to get the whole thing wedged in my tiny freezer.

And it helped. Really. By the time I wedged Saran-Wrapped Cinderella in the middle of the cake and frosted around her swirly blue dress, things were looking much more polished. Listing a little to the left, but still, more polished.

The finished product had the birthday girl very, very excited. Mainly because it was cake wrapped around what would ultimately be her new toy--a Cinderella doll to play with! Who cares about the cake! Thanks Mom!



Taa-daa! The community effort, Xanax-inducing, next-year-it's-Costco-all-the-way, Cinderella birthday cake.