My cake is dough

If ever, in the near or the distant future, any of you get a chance to work with me, especially if it involves something artistic, brain storming and doing something creative, run for your lives. Don’t say that you didn’t know, because you have been warned!

Be it picking curio shelves or picking curtains, I get all crazy. First I come up with a mental image. Then I put it down on paper – I either draw it or photoshop it, then I go around all the shops looking for it. The more I find that what I have in mind is not available anywhere, the more obsessed I get with what I cannot have. Then I come back to the table make some compromises, change the design a bit and go shopping again. After a million trips and a zillion changes, I realize what I have in mind is still not available anywhere. At this point of time, I give up shopping for it and, here comes the real headache, I roll up my sleeves and decide to make it myself. In the process the people around me and the people who interact with me go nuts.

I applied every ounce of my usual craziness to infant’s birthday cake. I was desperately looking for a theme and nothing unique came on to me. Hubby simply couldn’t understand the fuss behind all this. His logic is very simple. Cake = something we eat. So it has to taste great, who cares how it looks. Also he is oblivious to all the theme fundas I put. He noticed that the girls and I wore pink only after his elder sister pointed it out to him and this was about two weeks after the party! So I was on my own in picking the theme.

Suddenly a week before the party, the light in my head went on. Remember how toddler calls herself ‘Toddler Shortcake’ and infant ‘Infant Dumpling’ – after the Strawberry Shortcake and Apple Dumpling? Plus, I really liked the concept of spelling happy birthday with wooden alphabet blocks. This is her first birthday, so there has to be the number 1 some where in the cake. So this would be the rough draft.

To get the theme going I need to have plates, table covers, party caps and balloons to match with the cake. Finding accessories to go with the cake was a challenge. I wasn’t able to find any Strawberry Short Cake stuff. So chances of finding Apple dumpling products was even bleak. After visiting couple of stores and extensive web searching, the only thing I liked was this.

So after I put eveything together, tweaked the cake design a little bit and came up with this. THIS, I decided will be infant’s cake.

Now, if I could get Charm City Cakes to make the cake! (Have you watched their shows? I am a big fan.) I would have made cold calls to 20 different bakeries. Most of the bakers weren’t willing to do it even if I was willing to pay by the hour! Finally, the bakery section of a local grocery store agreed to take up the order out of pity, only because I had put in so much effort. They had couple of conditions. They said they will not draw the picture of Apple dumpling and we both agreed to scan the picture and print it out on edible rice paper and then stick it to the cake. The second condition was that, they cannot gurantee that the cake will look like the picture. I had to go with them as I was running out of time.

This was the final result.

I wasn’t too happy about how it looked, but for what it was worth, it tasted YUM.

Note to self: Get proficient in cake decoration before toddler’s third birthday.