Fella's Cake Bake 2012

There's nothing like waiting until the very last minute to accomplish something.  Each year, for the Cub Scout Blue & Gold Banquet, the boys and their fathers bake a cake in a friendly culinary competition.  Boys only!  No female influence.  At 10 o'clock that morning it occurred to me that the Fella's Cake Bake was less than eight hours away. 

Between that moment and the start of the banquet, we had to mix, bake, cool and decorate a cake.  Oh, we also had to take Ethan to a birthday party, attempt to get Logan down for a nap, purchase the ingredients and come up with a design.  It was all hands on deck!

Ashley immediately arranged a look of utter glee on her face and promptly left the house.  She would probably have made a faster getaway had it not been for the 175 pounds of whimpering husband attached to her leg begging her for mercy.

Fine!  Let's get organized.  What's this year's theme?  Pinewood derby.
Okay...

"Let's make an angry bird," I suggested.

"Yes!"

"Cool!"

The insanity was mounting.

Now, how do you make a round cake, 3-D of course, without a round cake pan?  Easy, you visit every store in the city and track one down.  What happens when that plan fails?  Think...think...aren't those ball-shaped cake pans constantly being advertised on TV?  Sadly, we couldn't wait 6-8 weeks for delivery.  We barely had 6-8 hours.  How about the library?  No, really.  Our library lets you check out specially shaped cake tins.  Who knew?

Unfortunately, the closest we could get was an Easter egg cake pan.  This raised an eyebrow with both Justin and the librarian.  Somehow, I had failed to fully convey my idea and everyone was under the impression that we were going to bake two Easter egg cakes (roughly the shape of half a hard boiled egg cut lengthwise), stand them on end and bind them together with some sort of frosting miracle.  Justin was very upset.  The librarian was very upset.  There was no time to argue, it would simply have to do.  Oh, ye of little faith.

In the end, we managed quite nicely.  Ethan made it to his party, Logan took a 20 minute nap and the cake took shape.  No injuries were reported, no trips to the emergency room and there was very little weeping.  Success!  I believe the hardest part was getting just the right color of yellow for the bottom feathers.  For a while, it looked like we were going to have to pick between different shades of diarrhea but we finally ended up with the correct combination of food coloring. 

We didn't win any awards.  When it came to the theme, we were slightly off course.  Our reward was the fun and the adventure as only we could have done it.  We'll remember this forever.

Not too bad for three boys, a can of white frosting and a dream.  Thank goodness this is only an annual event!

- 25 February 2012