The Cake

My children's birthdays are always a tad difficult for me. I am not into parties because frankly the type of party I would want to do I can't afford. But I still want to make it a memorable day...ahh dilemmas.

I think it was probably too many episodes of Cake Boss, but I decided that I was going to make Greyson's birthday special by making a fancy cake this year. As everyone knows his favorite thing in the whole wide world is hockey so I had the epiphany of making a cake in the shape of a hockey puck. I mean really how hard could a hockey puck cake be? It is round, singular color, no design on it to speak of. Slam Dunk. But of course I just couldn't make a round cake and frost it black, oh no, it had to look authentic so a la Cake Boss I decided I was going to put fondant on it.

So my first field trip was off to the cake decorating aisle of Michael's. While they had fondant, they didn't have singular colors and what packages they did have with black fondant were in such small amounts that I would have spent like $300 to get enough. So to the internet I went and found the only specialty cake store in Nashville. Field trip number two was to Sweetwise, which of course was no where near my house. At Sweetwise I learned a valuable lesson - fondant is not cheap. No wonder my wedding cake was so darned expensive. They had a sign up giving me a handy guide to how much fondant to purchase. One 8 inch round cake needed 2 pounds of fondant. Really?? So after a quick call to Raif we calculated I would need 6 lbs of fondant for Greyson's cake and the cakes for his birthday party at school.** I therefore left Sweetwise with $60 bucks and 6 pounds of black sugar.

The night before Greyson's birthday I baked a chocolate cake, had Raif slice off the top to make it level (we all know how good he is with knives) and settled in to work.

Fondant is sold in big tubs akin to Play-Doh. Although it is much tougher and thicker and far less pliable than Play-Doh. It is also extremely sticky - sticking to my rolling pin and the counter. The directions say to use powdered sugar to stop it from sticking but then I got white all over my black fondant which wasn't exactly the look I was going for. Finally after a team effort with multiple spatulas we finally got it off the counter and on to the cake. Now on Cake Boss the fondant falls effortlessly into place and is smooth everywhere. In real life, however, putting a flat circle on a round 3-D shape leaves you with lots of puckers and slits and all sorts of things I didn't know how to fix. But at the end of the day I ended up with this.....


Hey it wasn't perfect but then again Greyson is 5 and doesn't really know what a perfect cake was suppose to be.

The big day came and went and after dinner we turned off the lights and I popped in his candle and was all set for astonishment, adoration and one of his famous "Are you kidding me!!!?" or "YES!!!" What I got was a big fat blank look....

"Greyson what does your cake look like?"
"I don't know."
"What is your favorite thing ever?"
"Motorcycles!!!"
"No, what is your favorite sport?"
"Soccer!!"
"No, it is hockey. Does your cake look like anything you would see at a hockey game?"
Long pause. "No."
"It's a hockey puck. I made you a hockey puck cake, isn't that cool?"
"Yeah, can we eat it now?"

sigh. Happy Birthday to my baby boy. If you remember nothing of this birthday or this cake at least try to remember that I tried.



**So in my exuberance about the hockey puck cakes I not only decided to do one for the family but to also make individual ones for his class party. Talk about biting off more than you can chew.